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Technolog:
And so I'm falling a little bit in love with Linux. This is very much a grounded affair and I wouldn't describe myself as giddy with it, but I've changed my opinions about that whole murky side of computing life.
A lot of people ask me about my opinion of that operating system with the penguin logo. It happens with such regularity that I've come up with a stock phrase I immediately fire back: life's too short for Linux. This is a bit flippant, but it's also a distillation of what I've believed, which is that Linux is great and everything, but only if: (a) you have too much time on your hands; (b) you just like tinkering with computers; or (c) you somehow define yourself by an ideological allegiance to a piece of software. If you actually want to get anything done, fire up Windows and get on with it.
Linux, as you probably know, is essentially a version of Unix; they share the same commands and programs, the same X-based client/server windowing system and, most important of all, the same philosophy. This last part is what passes most people by, including myself until recently. Unix/Linux really is as much a philosophy as it is a set of programs forming an operating system. This philosophy basically boils down to the traditional engineering principle of keeping things simple wherever possible.
Note the use of the word "traditional" there. That's important since, in an industry in which nothing endures for longer than a year or two, Unix is nearly 40 years old. The first version was written by Ken Thompson at Bell Laboratories in 1969. This means it predates
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This would be just history and intellectual pondering if Unix had gone the way most of us have come to expect old software to go, getting bogged down in gradually increasing complexity, becoming ever more decrepit and irrelevant, and eventually being superseded by a new framework that does the same thing better. But now hop over, as I did this month, to www.damnsmalllinux.org and download its 50MB ISO file. Burn that to a CD. Pop it into the drive of any PC that happens to be around, making sure the PC is set to boot from the optical drive. Restart and wait a minute or two. And there you'll have it: a small, light, fast, compatible operating system that you can start using immediately. The network adaptor has been detected and it's found an IP address: click on that Firefox icon and you're away! You can't do that with Windows, and you never will be able to. DSL isn't the only Linux distribution to do this, although it's one of the smallest. Check out SLAX (www. slax.org), for instance, which is prettier but less minimal, although still only a 180MB download for the largest version.
Of course, the problem with an operating system on CD is that you can't modify it or save your settings. But that's okay, just click on the tool to install it to a USB flash drive. What you then have is a complete, customisable working environment on a stick that you can carry around with you. If you've ever tried moving a Windows XP installation from one PC to another and watched it choke while trying to work out what happened to the hardware it was running on yesterday, you'll appreciate how fascinating this is. DSL, which is based on Debian Linux, is fleet of foot and does all hardware detection on-the-fly at boot time. It seems to know about every piece of hardware there is, but if it finds something new it simply defaults to a generic driver and carries on booting. Within a minute you're up and running.
