Linux, Scary Scary Linux

Well, it used to be.

Thirty years ago. I discovered Linux when I was trying to get on the Internet. I like to virtue signal by saying I had to build an ISP to do that. I particularly love doing that when I’ve been called a boomer. At that time, the Internet could only be experienced through a terminal at the local community college. There was no dial-up. It was all text. There was no web browser.

Let’s do this thing. I ordered a Sun Server. Twenty grand, scary. We didn’t get the Sun Box, they sent us an Axil on loan until they could send us the Sun box. (SunOS? Solaris? I forget) We got a router from Sprint, it was two months late and not configured. It was supposed to be configured! The docs came in a box and measured at least a foot in depth.

I had rented a Dutch mathematician from Ottawa who was familiar with Linux/UNIX. To this day we both think that was the most fun we have ever had.

The router. We spent ten hours on the phone with Andrew in Vancouver. Andrew worked for Sprint and didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. We were always two steps ahead of him and eventually we extracted the three pages of the foot thick manual that held the esoteric knowledge of how to make the router do something that was far beneath its capabilities. Alakazam! I was on the Internet. Thinking at the time was that we should try to get this new Linux thingy to host the modems. Was there a plan? Nope, totally seat of the pants.

So we downloaded Linux. Slackware, source code, had to compile it all from a stack of disks as high as a box of Sprint router docs. Building it on Intel 80486 was pure joy. This is the kind of thing that nerds live for. I don’t remember having any problems getting it to work, I think it just worked. We installed the modem interface cards, three or four to a Linux server, each card connected to eight and then sixteen modems. I built racks for the 9600 baud modems that we eventually upgraded to 14400 baud. Two access points, one in a room at the back of a gas station in the nearest city and one here in town where we established an office. I built lots of modem racks. I enjoyed building the first rack. The second rack was OK. We kept getting customers and I quickly tired of building racks. You do what you have to. Sitting in a little room in the back of a gas station with 50 or 60 modems talking on the internet making their pingy noises was also, pretty cool.

Now, we’re getting good with Linux. I learned vi, the text editor for people who despise coding with Emacs. We built a Linux Usenet server, we hooked it up to a satellite dish. That too was pretty cool, we got a news feed from a satellite. Does it get any better? We built a web server. What’s that? Oh, you use this browser called NetScape to view HTML pages. Cool! What editor do I use to make HTML pages?

vi.

Linux at that time was definitely scary to the layman. For my part, I dropped DOS like a hot rock. Linux was/is a programmer’s toolkit. Often, rather than writing a program to do something you would string together a series of programs ‘piping’ data output from one program as input for the next. The power of the command line. Super cool!

It’s one thing to build a server that you connect to with a terminal, and another to have a graphics interface. Getting graphics cards to work with Linux was a trying experience. ATI to the rescue, they built drivers that worked on Linux and we played DOOM late into the night. We built a Linux server to replace the Axil and told Sun we didn’t need their steenking box and we were keeping the twenty grand, so there.

In those days you compiled custom kernels with drivers to connect to cards and peripherals, it was pretty touch and go.

These days Linux runs the Internet.

Share of operating systems families in TOP500 supercomputers by time trend

So, yes, you will be pleased to hear that there have been some improvements. You don’t have to compile the entire OS from scratch anymore. You can still kick ass on the command line but you don’t have to use it at all.

Open source. What does that mean exactly? Well, as with the original Slackware Linux distribution, which still exists, you can download the source code for anything, at least anything that I use, compile it yourself and know exactly what it does. No spying on you, no phoning home, no taking embarassing pictures of you and sending them off to the central face recognition repository at the NSA. Especially not that. I hate that. That is not cool. (I don’t know if they really do that, probably) There is another thing you should know about and that’s DRM. DRM is closed source software that lets you watch NetFlix et al. Copy protection. In a nutshell DRM generally arrives as a closed source browser extension. You will be asked if you would like to install it. Word of advice, don’t just say yes to every damned thing. If you must watch NetFlix do it on something else. Basically DRM is code written by Hollywood and the music industry. Do you trust Hollywood? You can’t know what it does, it might be taking embarassing pictures of you and sending them to the central face recognition repository at the NSA.

One other last thing, DON’T use the cloud. The cloud is a mystical magical term for someone else’s server. You don’t own that. You don’t control that. Buy a mass storage drive. Plug it into a USB port. Use that. Maybe back stuff up.

Mainstream OS’s, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android are all spyware. You do not need to put up with that shit. Linux is as easy to use these days as they are. The software is free. For my purposes the only thing that Linux doesn’t have software wise that rivals the other OS’s is a CAD system as good as AutoCAD. You might find that somewhere in your professional requirements you have the same problem, I can’t say but I have a windows box sitting here that I haven’t used in two years. Just in case. It’s not plugged in to any network. I does have a minor purpose, it sits there and soaks up my derision.

Let’s talk about you getting Linux. There are many distributions, the one that tries hardest to be user friendly is Ubuntu. Ubuntu may ask you if you want to use its cloud services, say no.

We are going to install Ubuntu Desktop. You will need a 16 gig or better USB stick. You will need a program to create a boot disk. You can run it from the USB stick to try it out if you like. It will be a little slow because: USB stick. You can dual boot, I once had five OS’s on a single machine because why not? I won’t cover dual booting, I’d have to go through the process myself first and I’m lazy. Programmers are lazy. So eventually ou will need a computer to put it on. It doesn’t need to be a kickass gaming server. For most things Linux uses less resources, this could be why it has saturated the super computer rankings. If you already have an old computer sitting around use that. You can always build a better one.

Step by step instructions are found here: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overview

I’ll run through it.

Download image. https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Use a boot disk writer to copy image to USB stick. https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Put USB stick in computer, preferrably connected to the Internet. If you’re using wireless you will be prompted when it wants on. I don’t use wireless, I’ve soaked up enough radiation sleeping in server rooms.

You need to boot from the USB stick, to do that you will likely have to change a BIOS setting. The BIOS is a bit of code on a chip that tells the computer what to do when you turn it on. In order to configure the BIOS you need to whack a key repeatedly while the computer is starting up. I think it’s the <del> key on this computer but if you can read real quick the instructions will zip by as the computer boots. This can be annoying, sorry. Once you get into the BIOS set it to boot from USB. There will be a boot order menu or some such. The BIOS menu is pretty simple. Make sure you save it and then restart to boot from the USB stick. Note that this will only happen if the USB stick is bootable so if, down the road, you leave a USB stick in that just has your wedding pics on it, it won’t try to boot from it.

If you got this far you will be loading up Linux, either to memory if you are going to try running from the USB stick or installing it to disk. If installing it is probably safe to select defaults, remembering that you don’t just say yes to every damned thing, although you probably can.

You’ll create a user account and then you can log in and use your new Linux box.

Take the USB stick out before you reboot.

I don’t use Ubuntu so I can’t say what the interface will be like. You’ll probably get Firefox as a browser. I think they went woke. I use Brave. There will be a software installer, play with that. You are now a Linux geek.

If you have any questions, ask nicely and it will be my pleasure to help you out.