It was in the mid 1990s that I first heard of a new OS on the block which was making waves. It was not actually an OS per, but a new Unix clone kernel.
It was called Linux - a project started by a guy called Linus Torvalds in a university of Helsinki. It intrigued me more and more as every magazine I picked up had a story of this guy and his philosophy of making a free OS for use.
My early days in computing before Novel Netware were the hard old unix days on a green dumb terminal. As windows slowly slipped in and took center stage I always thought that Unix was now old fashioned and mostly run off some old boxes in some ancient data centers. Ofcourse there were the Sun SPARC workstations which boasted their stability and ruggedness - but it was strictly a data center thing only.
Being an avid techie, I purchased "PC Quest", the premier IT magazine in India in those days which had a free Linux CD based on the Red Hat distribution. I got it in to my workplace and found an old 386 PC to load this new beast. It loaded ok and it was Unix for sure - but friendlier. Mistakes on the keyboard did not mean a spurt of control characters.
I had also heard that there was a GUI part of this distribuion called X-Server aong with Gnome desktop which was very similar to OS2 and Windows 95 which was to be released the same year.
I spent an awful amount of time juggling the .conf files and the Xfree86 server to get Xserver up and running. Several kernel compiles later, I finally started X. It crashed in the first few seconds. Nothing I did revived it. That was the end of my first experience of a Graphical Linux.
However I was bitten and madly in love with the the GNU foundation concept of open source, free software and community driven software for everyone which was free to use. However the climb was an uphill one. It required the best geek in me spending hours on a computer, sitting up late at night in office, going through usenet and several hundred hours of time spent searching on the internet . Those were the good old days of Altavista - no google :) !!
I finally came up to speed on this beast called Linux which was wild and required tremendous courage, determination, patience and will power to tame. I did manage to master it and finally some years later, I again got a new version of the Red Hat distribution, determined to dirty my hands and load up the Graphical shell.
Some days later, it was up and running. By this time Windows 95 was in the market and hot - people were wildly leaving their apple macs and Windows 3.1 and Dos units to this new cool OS called Windows. Windows 95 and MS Office were spreading like wild fire and whatever little forts holding out on existing on the Dos-Wordstar-Lotus 123 were finally conquered by Windows 95.
I managed to load Gnome finally - but what I saw was terrible and shameful, especially after having seen Windows 95. It was crude, out of proportions, very grey, totally uncool. It seemed like it was just there to be there and nothing beyond. It felt like a bullock cart when compared to the Windows 95 Ferrari. I never tried to make good use of it anyway. I also saw no point. What does one do beyond staring at the GUI. There was no MS Office or any other interesting software to run off it. There was the clunky and heavy Mozilla, the opensource initiative of Netscape. But it was a shame compared to the light and sleek Windows Internet Explorer 4.0. Even the screen fonts on X-Server were a pain to the eye.
Linux however was soundly entrenched in my tool box - a useful "swissknife" on the backend for quick mail servers, http servers, system administration. It worked beautifully on the command line and never once crashed or hung - it simply refused to go down with the worst of abuse. It was amazing considering that Windows technology was slowly becoming in to a gigantic and enormous white elephant. The days were here that the OS dictated to the hardware companies, what they should make. Such was (and perhaps is even now) the clout of Mr. Bill Gates.
For the next couple of years I graduated to Windows 2000, Windows XP and finally to windows 2003. All alongside I always closely followed the Linux Desktop scene. With every new potential distro coming out which showed potential, my home PC would be guinea pig. I would lovingly spend time tinkering and trying to make a desktop case for Linux. But wisdom lack of software and tools made it a good hobby - but never a serious desktop tool. Too many driver issues, screen font issues and last still – bad Office software made the case still not appealing for a switch.
Some months back, my Windows XP installation decided to crash on me without any notice or reason. I was anyway looking at an excuse to load Windows 2003 server as Windows XP was not up to mark in the various demanding network protocols I use like bittorrent, emule and other P2P networking protocols. The networking in XP was only good for general googling around the net.
I took the opportunity and loaded a spanking new installation of Windows 2003 server in dual boot mode with my Windows XP station. My networking problems were reduced, but not eliminated. I had to "hack" the tcpip.sys file in the Windows 2003 kernel to make the networking performance come up to a decent level. Thanks to the severe Windows security vulnerabilities and viruses, Microsoft codes its kernel to accept no more than 8 half open connects - a ridiculous number for any demanding networking protocol !
Last weekend my W3K Server gave up - Starting the system last Friday gave me a sweet "error in loading operating system" error. It was a feeling of banging your head on the wall - the feeling of throwing down your computer from the highest place on earth. I broke down cause the OS took with it my Windows XP installation as well. I wasnt ready to load it all over again.
Luckily I had a Live CD of Ubuntu Linux 7.0.4 Fiesty Fawn. Ubuntu distribution is making a revolution of sorts in the Linux world. I decided to use my Linux skills to good use and revive my Windows installation.
I fired up the Ubuntu live disk and in a few minutes; with but a single tweak to the xorg.config; I had an awesome linux GUI looking at me in my face. I had touched Linux after almost 2 years now and I was shocked to see the progress. I had read a lot about Ubuntu on the internet and was lucky enough to download the image some days back, hoping to try it someday, but so far lacked the motivation !
Ubuntu amazed me. I spent a few minutes only looking at the wonderful earth brown Gnome interface. All my hardware including the Microsoft Wireless keyboard/mouse along with all its internet short cuts, my motherboard, display graphics, sound, and monitor; they were all detected. Unlike Windows XP and Windows 2003 server I did not have to look around or load a single driver.
All my hardware, including my latest Canon SD630 camera, Nokia 6630, my Sony handycam were all detected the moment I plugged them in. As soon as I plugged in any hardware, an application politely fired up waiting for my instructions on what to do with the device. Amazing !!
OpenOffice.org and all other applications were all well integrated in to the desktop without any depressing digression in the look, feel and behaviour in the different apps as was the case earlier.
Grub, the Linux boot loader managed to see all my windows installations and gave a new lease of life to my Windows XP installation :)
All along I have been impressed by the linux philosophy of free software. The thought which amazes me most is that a community of motivated people work together, happily coding away for years on end. Free for the world to use. The thought that people are coding for the joy of it united under the underlying philosophy that people around the world should be able to use software for free, based on openstandards is so overwhelming.
I felt so good not having to go for the cracked software I would otherwise need on the Windows machine, right from the CD Burner to good audio/video programs, compression programs, antivirus programs.
Opensource is software is not some shabby, crude piece of software at all. Ubuntu took it to new heights as its philosophy takes on the philosophy of free software and adds to it the dire requirement of today “humaneness”. In today's world where v
iolence, intolerance to one another and reluctance to share is increasingly taking on mankind; here is a group of people who spend their time, energy and even money to make software for free.
It makes me feel going closer to nature, of connecting to mankind around the world with the message of peace, love and happiness for all !
It is amazing - a community riding on such high ideals !
In the world where we have monopolistic companies like Microsoft trying to dominate the world computing scene and force its version of computing on mankind, without allowing anyone else to survive, we have the Opensource forum who are the torch bearers of technology which is open, visionary and aimed at benefiting mankind.
Over the next days,weeks and months, I intend to blog down my experience with this amazing OS called Linux and a distribution which makes it more so - Ubuntu.
For people who think Vista is the cool new OS of the day, take a look at my screen shots hosted on Picasweb here.
My Ubuntu DesktopThere are screen shots of my Ubuntu Desktop at home. Watch the cube carefully. It is an advanced desktop light years ahead of Windows Vista edition. It sports multiple faces of a cube where the multiple workspaces can be used. It makes life so much easier. Look at the effects and the customization I can do, especially the window decorations.
The later one is a soothing Crystal Glass effect perfect with Glass Icons and for those who are confused, I have also loaded a set of Vista Icons to make it even better looking than Vista ;)
