{"id":112,"date":"2011-10-01T07:01:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-01T07:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sibha.online\/wprandom\/2011\/10\/01\/an-ongoing-affair-with-tux\/"},"modified":"2020-06-08T14:35:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T09:05:06","slug":"an-ongoing-affair-with-tux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/RR\/2011\/10\/01\/an-ongoing-affair-with-tux\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ongoing Affair with Tux"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/ins><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

What is common among \u00a0Tux,\u00a0\u00a0Penguins, Lizards, Fawns, Gibbons, Herons and Lynx\u00a0? They all represent some version \u00a0\/distro<\/a> of\u00a0Linux<\/a>\u00a0in general and Ubuntu in particular.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
The affair started sometime in circa 2000, when I first read about linux , probably in PCQuest. It was all very romantic for a computer buff; a student finds a commercial software too costly for him and he decides to write his own. He shoots of a mail into cyberspace asking for assistance and is overwhelmed by the number of netizens taken in by the idea. The day when another mail was sent around the world announcing the birth of a workable kernel is\u00a0observed\u00a0as Linux’s B’day. Geeks of the world unite, and you have nothing to lose but the chain imposed by\u00a0propriety\u00a0software. Till today, software developers, graphics\u00a0<\/span>designers<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0technical writers \u00a0from all over the world are finding \u00a0some self- fulfilment in working for the Open Source Software . Software should be free as in \u00a0‘Mukt’ if not free as in \u00a0‘Muft’.<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
I was then posted at Mhow. The idea so caught my fancy\u00a0that, I had to try it out, at the earliest. As a first step, I visted the kajuri bazaar, the popular market for new and second hand books at\u00a0Indore. It was not easy to find a book on\u00a0Linux. After an hour or so of rummaging through some old stock, I found a book on installing and configuring\u00a0Linux. The \u00a0book \u00a0came with two free<\/b> CDs of Slackware\u00a0Linux<\/a>\u00a0!<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The book started with a Disclaimer in bold letters<\/b>. The developers of the software promised full refund of any amount paid for\u00a0purchase\u00a0of the product<\/b> but would not be responsible for any harm done to your hardware by following their instructions! Mind you those were the times a computer costed my four month’s pay, and a hard disk costed\u00a0at least\u00a0a month’s pay.<\/span>So, \u00a0the first two days were spent in reading through 200 odd pages of technical writing. Then more time was spent in understanding the hardware, since if you don’t know what was the model and make of the components in your system, you can’t expect a dumb CD to figure it out.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span><\/div>\n
The most scary thing was partitioning the hard disk.\u00a0But\u00a0armed with a Jonathan Saches book on Dos 2.0, (Idiot series and Dummy series books wouldn’t touch such issues with a barge pole) I soon became an expert on manual\u00a0partitioning\u00a0\u00a0of a hard disk. I could say, “just do a fdisk, specify the starting cylinder and sector and ending\u00a0cylinder\u00a0and sector , make it bootable and save it !”<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Since then every comp at my home or ofice has had atleast one dedicated partition for linux and most often a PC had three partitions for the tux, for\u00a0different\u00a0flavours of Linux, you see.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

It was a great day when I had written the root image on one floppy and the kernel image on another floppy \u00a0and loaded a linux OS on my\u00a0Pentium\u00a0machine.\u00a0Linux\u00a0booting is always pretty, a series of informative, sometime funny messages scrolling up the screen before a nice little hash prompt is displayed for your next command.\u00a0<\/span>The better part was selecting and and installing apps using a primitive package tool.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
JOE<\/a><\/b> (J<\/b>oe’s O<\/b>wn E<\/b>ditor) was my favourite\u00a0<\/span>word processor. For someone who has seen vi editor Joe was 22nd century<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
app. Then there was the text based spread\u00a0sheet\u00a0called SC (Spreadsheet\u00a0calculator), its GUI version was xspread \u00a0and xv was a great image viewer. All these were ‘Wow’ apps for me. In the linux world , either the app was named after its developer like Joe or it\u00a0splashed\u00a0the developers name like John Brodly’s xv<\/a>.\u00a0<\/b><\/span>
\n
\n<\/b><\/span>
\nLinux\u00a0has X – Windows\u00a0System<\/a> to cater for GUI \u00a0apps. It was fairly easy to set up. All you had to do was a short research on monitors and display cards and it was done!<\/span>\u00a0, <\/b>But what a range of Window managers\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
2-3 days later, the internet was through. Oh, you just had to study how Point to Point Protocol (PPP) worked and had to write out a few configuration files using., ya you guessed it right, Joe (joe’s own editor). It was followed by email client called elm and a great improvement on elm ie Pine<\/a> (P<\/b>ine I<\/b>s N<\/b>ot E<\/b>lm)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\n
<\/a><\/div>\n

It was pure bliss when I had\u00a0configured\u00a0the network interfaces and the aliases<\/b>. Typing \u00a0‘d’ (for dial) would connect me to the net in precisely 22 seconds (a dial up handshake sounded so sweet ) and typing ‘dak’ would fire up the fetchmail program \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0to display the incoming mails. (My firends using ms windows and yahoomail spent half an hour on retrieving mails, on a dial up connection.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
The next six months passed in trying out various flavours of linux. Bought a book on caldera\u00a0Linux\u00a0as well, It had a GUI installation and actually you could play tetris while installation was going on in the background. A \u00a0great find was linux on floppy or Mu-Linux. We used it in our lab to teach unix commands. The \u00a0developer of Mu-Linux<\/a>, M Andreoli calls it a cardware; you are expected to send a post-card to him after installation. The entire functional OS fits in a floppy.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Then from Mhow we moved to the Kumaon hills; There was a two year period of lull or should I say “Null”, leave alone internet , even a\u00a0telephone\u00a0connection was erratic at Pithoragarh.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
Then in 2003 we moved to\u00a0Coimbatore\u00a0and my affair with tux resumed. This time it was Red Hat<\/a> -6 followed by 7.1. By then X- windows system had come of age and even the text consoles in Linux started looking colourful. (True Linux lovers cannot live without a text console and the # prompt which lets you do anything from command line). For the first time , Linux ie Red Hat posed a serious competition to MS windows. It was around this time Red Hat\u00a0itself\u00a0started behaving windowish, whatwith enterprise edition and all. The hat later \u00a0became a ‘Fedora<\/a>‘ . By “windowish” I mean, getting too\u00a0snotty, taking decisions on user’s behalf on how you should use your comp, \u00a0laying down too many Do’s and Don’ts, just as Microsoft Windows does.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
It looked\u00a0as if\u00a0the growth of\u00a0Linux\u00a0had\u00a0plateaued\u00a0out and\u00a0competition\u00a0with windows on\u00a0Microsoft’s\u00a0own terms meant losing the personality of free thinking geeks.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0A good Open Source Software lets the user, explore, discover, learn and enjoy the\u00a0process\u00a0of living with a system, being with a system. The system is user friendly for one to explore freely,\u00a0customize\u00a0the environment, and enjoy the whole process of learning\u00a0even while<\/span><\/span>\u00a0 working. It also lets free sharing of code among developers to modify, customize and improve. In short, it was collaboration rather than competition, just caring and sharing and helping.<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Quoting the\u00a0Free Software Foundation’s<\/a>,\u00a0‘What is Free Software,’<\/a>\u00a0the freedoms at the core of free software are defined as:<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n