Re: I want to migrate to Linux

pcbldrNinetyEight <pcbldrninetyeight.com> wrote:

Aragorn <aragorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:3Ebxj.225035$901.92433@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:

pcbldrNinetyEight <pcbldrninetyeight.com> wrote:

I want to migrate from WIN98SE to Linux and am looking for advise.

<big snip of things about which I am unqualified to make any intelligent
comment about>

;-)

Those things were mainly intended to make you better understand some
low-level stuff regarding partitioning and UNIX or GNU/Linux interiors. ;-)

Microsoft considers the x86 platform to still be what it was when it was
first introduced in the IBM PC in 1982, i.e. a single-user home machine,
which can of course also be used in offices for regular office work -
because computers are never used for science, right? :p

As such, Microsoft Windows still maintains the old-style drive letters,
which stem from Digital Research's CP/M operating system, which was later
"rewritten in a not too legal fashion" by Tim Patterson of Seattle
Computer. Patterson had called this "rewritten CP/M" QDOS - for "Quick &
Dirty Operating System"; not to be confused with the Q(uick)-DOS
filemanager - and had deemed it pretty useless.

Around that time, IBM had approached Digital Research's Gary Kildall, the
owner of the company and developer of CP/M, to provide for the operating
system for the IBM Personal Computer, but a series of no-shows by Kildall
at agreed meetings and disagreements with Kildall's wife over the licensing
and IBM's emphasis on a non-disclosure agreements led the Big Blue guys to
turn to Bill Gates, who hesitated the first time - he said that "Microsoft
does not produce any operating systems" - but chose to seize the
opportunity when IBM appealed onto him again after failing to negotiate
their intended use of CP/M, and subsequently bought Tim Patterson's QDOS
and rebranded it MS-DOS.

The successor to MS-DOS was to be OS/2, a joint venture between IBM and
Microsoft. OS/2 was a single-user multitasking operating system that made
use of the protected mode on i286 and i386 processors. Its first version
had a menu-driven user interface based upon the DOS Shell, but subsequent
1.x versions had a GUI called Presentation Manager, from which the Windows
3.x user interface was derived. OS/2 also made use of DOS-like commands
and drive letters.

Back around 1990, IBM had an agreement running with Microsoft that IBM would
develop the next generation of OS/2, OS/2 2.x, which was to be a 32-bit
operating system - OS/2 1.x was still 16-bit - and was to feature an
entirely new object-oriented graphical user interface, the Workplace Shell.

(I myself have used OS/2 2.x for 5 years, whereas other people were using
the combination of MS-DOS/PC-DOS/DR-DOS and Windows 3.x(x) at first and
Windows 95 later on. My only experience with Windows dates back to the
first 6 months of owning my first PC - which came with DOS 5.0 and Windows
3.0 - pending the public release of OS/2 2.0, and about two years of using
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation - more as a hobby, as I didn't have any internet
connection and I would often go weeks without even looking at my computer -
between late 1997 and late 1999.)

But to continue, the deal between IBM and Microsoft was that Microsoft were
to concentrate its effort on the 3.x version of OS/2, which was to be
dubbed OS/2 NT. At that time however, Microsoft took that plan and turned
it into *Windows* NT instead, with as a result that IBM had to develop the
3.x generation of OS/2 itself, which they would end up calling OS/2 Warp.

With all of the above in mind, you can see that Windows in essence still
traces back to MS-DOS and even Digital Research's CP/M. However, computer
hardware and computer technology have evolved a great deal over these last
two decades, and so did the x86 platform. As of the Intel 80386 on, x86
systems were capable of running UNIX-like operating systems such as GNU -
be it with the Linux kernel (which was written on an i386!) or with any of
the other available kernels that work with GNU - or the various BSD's, or
proprietary UNIX systems like SCO XENIX, Sun Solaris or the at that time
revolutionary BSD-based NeXtSTeP by Steve Jobs.

Despite Microsoft's aspirations to get Windows deployed in the business
market - something they have partially succeeded in - Windows itself is
still mainly designed as a "home computer operating system", and the server
version is based upon that paradigm, but with a slightly better usage of
the capabilities in the NT kernel, which itself was not written by
Microsoft but by Dave Cutler, who had developed the VMS operating system at
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). Cutler was even caught redhanded
inserting literal VMS code - property of DEC! - into the NT kernel, and DEC
wanted to sue Microsoft, but a settlement was reached out of court. Cutler
was then hired by Microsoft, as they had also hired Tim Patterson from
Seattle Computer earlier.

GNU/Linux on the other hand is an operating system consisting of two major
components, i.e. the Linux kernel and the GNU userspace libraries and
toolchain. Both projects were and still are developed independently and
with different intentions.

GNU was an initiative from Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software
Foundation. Their intent was to create a freely licensed UNIX-like system,
with the emphasis on the political aspect of freedom, and the UNIX
architecture being chosen because of its portability, scalability,
flexibility, versatility, security and robustness. Their native kernel
however still isn't considered stable or mature enough, and this is where
Linux comes in.

Linux was developed by IT student Linus Torvalds as he was using Minix -
i.e. a UNIX-like operating system written for educational purposes by
Andrew Tanenbaum - but wanted to rewrite some of the Minix code as he was
unhappy with it, and the Minix license did not allow modification. So he
decided to write his own kernel from scratch, and as he was a follower of
Richard Stallman's philosophy - something which has cooled down quite a bit
over the last decade or so - he and his co-developing friends ported the
GNU tools and libraries to work with the Linux kernel, which he then also
released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most popular Free
& Open Source Software license. (Note: Linux is continuing to be released
under GPLv2, while the FSF prefers the latest version of the GPL, GPLv3).

UNIX and UNIX-like systems - the name "UNIX" is trademarked and may legally
only be used by operating systems which are certified by the Open Group for
compliance with their Single UNIX Specification - originate from the world
of minicomputers and mainframes - UNIX was developed by Ken Thompson and
Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1960s for use on a DEC PDP-7
and later a PDP-11 minicomputer - and those machines are typically
multi-user computers. (Note: Despite the Open Group's objections to the
usage of the trademark UNIX name by non-certified operating systems, Ken
Thompson has stated that GNU/Linux and cousins are all de facto UNIX
systems.) Such machines were and are mainly used for very technical stuff
- rather than the multimedia- and office-minded "personal computers" - and
thus they have a history of appealing more onto the technical knowledge and
skill of their users. Still, UNIX is not such a user-unfriendly operating
system design.

The entire above history lesson only serves as to show you the different
vantages behind both Windows and UNIX-like systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD
and the likes. The more technically oriented background of UNIX systems
makes that UNIX-like systems are in fact much more logical in their design
and in the way they are used than Windows, which was developed for
single-user environments and with flat commercialism in mind. Windows
originally didn't even have networking support.

The ubiquity of Windows has led the masses to adopt certain Windows-specific
traits as being proper to a computer as a piece of technology, while those
things are in fact abberations, e.g. the frequent need for rebooting -
which is not exactly beneficial to your hardware as a reboot - especially a
cold boot - represents multiple powerspikes and high CPU loads - or the
need to regularly defragment the filesystem. Windows also has a lot of
security holes because of the fact that it was never designed to be
networked, despite the replacement of MS-DOS by the VMS-based NT kernel.
The base layout and internal design of Windows is still grafted on those
narrow single-user principles, nevertheless. And all the Windows-isms like
rebooting et al are _not_ normal computer behavior. GNU/Linux has a UNIX
design, and UNIX was (and still is) mainly used on mainframes,
supercomputers, minicomputers and scientific workstations. Such systems
require 24/7 uptime and cannot afford to need such idiocies as regular
reboots, protection against virus/spyware/trojan infections by third-party
software or frequent filesystem defragmentation.

GNU/Linux is very different from Windows. As mentioned by another poster,
KDE has a somewhat Windows-like appearance in its default configuration -
which is totally changeable, by the way; mine actually looks quite
different - but what's underneath the hood is quite a different beast.
Having used Windows for a long time, you will have to unlearn some of the
habits and Windows behavior expectations, some of which I've been
attempting to draw your attention onto. ;-)

That all said, the wonderful graphical user interfaces available for
GNU/Linux (and other UNIX-like operating systems) and the logic behind the
UNIX design - which is basically all about logic, not about some big
corporation making decisions for you - will soon enough win you over. ;-)

Can the partioning be accomplished by point and click?

Absolutely, unless you are using any of the *buntus, Debian or Slackware.
At least, to my knowledge the installation of Debian or Ubuntu and siblings
is mainly done via a menudriven interface, but then it still should be
quite trivial.

All other desktop-oriented distributions typically use mousedriven
installation procedures and utilities. Mandriva for instance - and I
presume that PCLinuxOS uses the same tools - uses its own graphical
partitioning tool, called /DiskDrake/ - the name dates back to when
Mandriva was still called MandrakeSoft.

RedHat, Fedora Core and CentOS make use of the RedHat /anaconda/ set-up
utility, which also has a graphical partitioning tool built-in - it might
be /gparted,/ but I'm just guessing as I've never checked.

Most distributions also come with individual graphical partitioning tools,
and even among the commandline partitioning tools, there is a particularly
good one that's typically supplied with every distribution, i.e. /cfdisk./
It's completely menu/arrow-key-driven.

Edubuntu is aimed especially towards children.

I'm feeling particularly dim now so this might be for me.

Well, I didn't mean to suggest that it's for newbies but that it features a
lot of educational tools - e.g. pertaining to language, typing, spelling,
sciences, etc. - and games.

Assuming I can come to grips with all of these concepts I can't picture
being able to sit in front of a PC and make any practical use of this at
the command line given my current lack of experience. I don't want to
sound like a broken record but how much of this can I do while still
avoiding the command line?

Most of it, in any recent desktop-oriented distribution. In UNIX systems,
most tools are in fact commandline utilities, but there are (at least one
but typically multiple) GUI front-ends to allow you to use those
commandline back-ends. This design is so as to be able to use those
utilities regardless of whether you have a GUI running or not, and it makes
quite a lot of sense as the GUI tools therefore don't need to clog up the
memory. The distribution's installer will typically preconfigure any GUI
packages you install to make use of the non-GUI tools you have installed,
and if one GUI package requires a non-GUI tool that you have not installed,
it will be installed as a dependency.

For instance and mentioned by other users as well, let's take a partitioning
tool. There is /gparted,/ which has a Gnome-like appearance, and there
is /qtparted,/ which has more of a KDE-like appearance. Both of these make
use of /parted,/ which is a non-graphical tool. (PARTition EDitor).

For CD-/DVD-burning, there are several graphical tools available which make
use of the non-graphical back-ends such as /cdrdao/ and /cdrecord./ I
strongly recommend KDE's K3B burning tool; it's really userfriendly and
feature-rich.

Are there any online step by step walk throughs that would be suitable
given what I want to do?

Well, just about every commandline utility comes with an on-disk manual -
note: these are manuals, not prosaic guides or tutorials - but there are
typically lots of HTML and plain text documentation files in
*/usr/share/doc.* Next to that, you can also find those and lots more at
the "Linux Documention Project" website, i.e.

http://www.tldp.org

I also strongly recommend reading Paul Sheer's RUTE, which is however quite
lengthy and pretty technical. You can find it here...:

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Can you recommend any beginner books like "Linux for the totally
clueless" ;-) Thank you for your help.

As another poster mentioned, there is a book called "Linux For Dummies", but
there are also other, more distribution-oriented books. Mandriva for
instance provides for good documention - available both in a printed
version or as online reading, albeit that I'm not up to date anymore on
their user service, so it might be possible that they require you to a paid
subscription to the Mandriva Club even for the online version - I
personally feel that Mandriva has been suffering from a severe degree of
corporatitis for years already, the pinnacle of which was their decision to
lay off the company's founder Gael Duval, who has in the meantime started a
userfriendly, newbie-oriented (but still quite beta-level) and
self-maintaining distribution called Ulteo, based upon the Debian package
management system.

http://www.ulteo.com

Next, you may also want to bookmark...

http://www.linuxnewbie.org

.... and...

http://www.linux.org

There's probably a whole lot more on the web, and last but not least, Google
is your friend. ;-) Google archives Usenet via Google Groups, and you may
often find useful posts there regarding a specific problem you might have
which have already expired on the newsservers themselves. Google also
archives the Linux Kernel Mailing List and several other such exchanges of
information.

It is often claimed - by Windows-minded people, of course - that GNU/Linux
is not user-friendly, and that there is a steep learning curve. I will
fully admit that GNU/Linux and other UNIX-style systems are more technical
than something like Windows or a MacIntosh, but that's only because they
are so much more powerful.

At the same time, for anyone who's never ever sat at a computer in their
life, even Windows has a fairly steep learning curve, and some of the
Windows-typical stuff might even seem quite illogical to such people - in
fact, that would only be righteously so - because the only reason Windows
*doesn't* seem illogical to Windows users is the fact that they're
habituated to it. So the alleged "steep learning curve" of GNU/Linux is a
matter of subjective perception by Windows addicts, not a factual truth.

In fact, people who are totally new to IT and really want to learn and
understand computers are far better off and will have less problems using
and understanding GNU/Linux than if they were to start using Windows, which
is in my humble opinion an ugly mess and most likely the worst operating
system design to have ever existed.

A frequent misconception is then also the typical question as to why Windows
is so ubiquitous if GNU/Linux is so much better, but this is once again an
irrational, Windows-indoctrinated question. Windows is ubiquitous *only*
because of the monopolistic deals Microsoft makes with consumergrade
computer manufacturers - which has in the meantime also extended from the
typical personal computer into the realm of PDAs and smartphones - but
luckily this is beginning to change now that many big names in the computer
industry have started to back GNU/Linux.

Companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics)and Sun
Microsystems all have their proprietary UNIX-branded operating systems. IBM
has AIX, Hewlett-Packard has HP/UX, SGI has IRIX, Sun Microsystems has
Solaris. Yet these companies all know that GNU/Linux is just as good and
at the same time a lot more interesting to invest development resources
into than still trying to innovate through their own expensively licensed
proprietary operating systems, especially with regard to the widespread and
versatile x86 architecture. Novell and RedHat are two of the bigger names
in the GNU/Linux world and are both also delegating developers to working
on the Linux kernel. Dell is also cooperating on the Linux kernel
development.

Processor manufacturers AMD and Intel are also actively cooperating on the
development of the Linux kernel, albeit that their motives are quite
different - AMD is typically more FOSS- and standards-minded than Intel,
which has already shown a lot of monopolistic behavior and the same kind of
foul play as Microsoft, with whom they are also participate in a common
endeavor called the Trusted Computing Platform.

Peripheral hardware vendors such as Adaptec and LSI are also actively
cooperating on the development of the Linux kernel and are offering
GPL-licensed drivers to the tree. Many other companies are also offering
drivers or other software for GNU/Linux - albeit proprietary and
binary-only - for GNU/Linux, e.g. Brother, nVidia, Adobe, Sun Microsystems,
VMWare, et al.

Google's Android operating system for the upcoming Google phone is based
upon GNU/Linux. Nokia and Motorola both have GNU/Linux-based cellphones in
their offer. Many routers from Cisco and LinkSys use a GNU/Linux-based
operating system, as to many set-top boxes and most of the pre-built
consumergrade NAS solutions.

It has taken a long time and it's still moving at slow pace, but the IT
industry is starting to realize that GNU/Linux and FOSS (Free & Open Source
Software) are valuable, are here to stay and are simply the perfect roadmap
to the future. ;-)

Oh, and by the way, Sun Microsystems has just built a brandnew one-off
supercomputer, capable of 500 Teraflops. It's got 15'744 dualcore AMD
Opteron processors, and it runs... GNU/Linux... ;-)

GNU/Linux is not user-unfriendly, but it requires that the user keeps a
computer-friendly state of mind. ;-)

Don't fear the penguin... :p

--
Aragorn
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.

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