A brief introduction to Linux


[updated 2024]: The following is the text of a short presentation I gave to my local computer club back in (probably about) 2002. I recently uncovered it during a file reorganisation and thought it might be interesting to upload. You may disagree…


What is Linux?

In a nutshell, Linux is an operating system (OS), like Windows which you are all no doubt familiar with. An OS is the basic software that tells your hardware what to do.

What’s in a name?

Technically, Linux simply refers to the “kernel” (or core) of the operating system. On top of this are placed many basic (and not so basic) utilities that actually let you do stuff using the kernel.

According to Richard Stallman (of the Free Software Foundation), as these tools outweigh the kernel many times over in most Linux systems, and because most of them are GNU utilities from his organisation, the correct name for the OS should be GNU/Linux. However, most users and vendors, rightly or wrongly, simply call it Linux. For simplicity’s sake, I will follow that convention.

What is so good about Linux?

In no particular order, Linux is good because it is free (more about that later), stable, very customisable (in almost every way), mostly open-sourced (which means you can modify it if you are a programmer), well supported by a community of users, has an enormous amount of (mostly free) software available for it, will run on almost any hardware (from an old 386 to a G4 Mac to an IBM mainframe).

Did you say free?

Yes. Richard Stallman, when he says free software, tells us to “think free speech, not free beer”. But the fact is most Linux distributions are free as in beer too. You can download them off the net, copy or borrow a CD from a friend or have it pre-installed by a PC manufacturer. Most vendors also have versions for sale, but the cost (say $50-100, compared with $300-500 or more for Windows) tends to be for the manuals and/or support services.

On top of that, most software for Linux is free in the same way. Many software companies (though not MS strangely enough) do offer their commercial packages for sale to run on Linux as well.

Distribution? What’s that?

Even though the source code for Linux is freely available, it is a very complex task to compile to to run on your system.

So software companies and organisations come into play here with their distributions (or distros). Basically a distro is a CD (or set of CDs more likely now), with an installer and a selection of precompiled binaries which you can select from to install on your computer.

The different distros use some very different systems to do this and while the basic OS is the same, going from one distro to another can be a bit confusing.

I tend to use a distro called RedHat, though I am in the process of compiling a new system from scratch. Chris tells me he used Mandrake (originally a copy of RedHat but now a very powerful and cutting-edge system in its own right). Others include Debian (critically acclaimed as the best distro for a number of reasons though not for beginners), SUSE (popular in Europe), Slackware (the grandfather of all distros), TurboLinux (popular in Asia for its internationalisation support), YellowDog (for Mac hardware) and literally dozens of others.

A run-down on the history of Linux

Linux is designed to be a UNIX-like OS. Unix was developed by AT&T in the late 60s and 70s to be a multi-user, time-sharing OS for mainframe computers. It came to be very popular in universities, spread widely and came out in many different commercial varieties.

In the early 90s, Linus Torvalds from Finland (Linux is a play on his name blended with UNIX), decided he wanted to run UNIX on his 386, but couldn’t afford to buy it. So he wrote his own! He posted it to the net, allowing everyone to see his programming code and gained help from all over the world developing it.

How do you use it?

Traditionally, Linux/UNIX is a command-line OS (ie. text-only, non-graphical) like (but much more powerful than) DOS. With many tools, I find that running them from the command line is much more powerful that from a GUI (graphical user interface). That is, it is much easier to get the program to do exactly what you want.

But, Linux (and other UNIXes) do have a GUI - it is called the X-window system. Like most things on Linux, it is available in many different varieties, but the free version is called Xfree86.

X does not display graphics all on its own. X is a server and it requires clients do the obvious work. The most important X-client you will use is the “window manager”. This is a piece of software that determines how your desktop will look. And unlike the Windows GUI, there is an enormous number of window managers available - from the very highly configurable (and to my mind, confusing) Enlightenment, to the basic TWM which ships with Xfree, to WindowMaker and AfterStep. I personally use one called XFCE, which I’m told is a desktop environment rather that a window manager, but I’m not completely sure of the difference, so I won’t go into that… GNOME and KDE are two other desktop environments and are far and away the most popular.

Most distributions now tend to start X as soon as you start Linux, much like Windows. But you can change the default to the command line if you like, or simply drop down to the shell (ie a command line) whenever you want to (like a DOS prompt in Windows).

What can linux do?

This is a quick list of some of the applications I use on Linux just to give you an idea: rp3 (internet dialer), Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Galeon (web browsers), Lynx (a text-only browser), balsa (email client), sendmail (email server), licq (instant messenger), xchat (irc client), GTM (download manager), gnucash, emma (financial managers), star office (office suite with ms-office compatible file formats), abiword (open-source word processor), GIMP (image program), gnp, gedit (text editors, good for web pages), xmms, freeamp (music players), bzip2, tar, gzip (command line compression/decompression utilities), gnomehack, gnobots, gnomemines, gnomestones, samegnome, freecell, freeciv (games!!), mc (a text-only file manager), wine (a windows compatibility layer that allows me to run some windows programs, in my case Logos Library System, getright and Arachnophilia).

To prove the point that Linux is every bit as capable as Windows, I wrote this report using gedit, connected to the internet using rp3 and mailed this to Lesley using balsa and sendmail.

Are there any down sides to linux?

Of course, I’d be lying if I said their weren’t. It isn’t for everybody, even if I love it!

Again in no particular order, you might not like Linux (and prefer to stick with Windows) because: it is more complex than Windows and take a while to get a handle on it, you may need to partition your hard drive (not for the faint of heart), some things you cannot get software for (yet - eg my scanner), some hardware is not compatible (eg new internal modems, called software modems or winmodems) and sometimes you just need compatability with Windows software (after all “everybody” uses it!).

Where to now?

What else can I say?

Take a look at Linux.com, Linux.org, The Free Software Foundation, Linuxworld.com.au, Linuxnewbie.org and other sites (do a search) and see what you can find out. Get your hands on APCtech’s Linux Pocketbook if you can (there are others, but theirs is the best), maybe from the newsagent or from APC Magazine


01 Sep 2002 | Updated 30 Nov 2024 | Comment via email or Mastodon | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Next >