The first time I ever drove a car was on a one-mile stretch of straight country road at 5 A.M. After a ten-second driving lesson from my cousin, I found myself driving in the middle of the road with the headlights off. Another car approached and we started to panic. My cousin yelled at me to get in my own lane and turn on the headlights, and I responded by almost veering off the road as I frantically searched the dashboard for the control to turn on the lights. Driving bumper cars at the carnival had not prepared me for this.
Many people wanting to try Linux for the first time find themselves similarly unprepared. They are often worried that they'll lose data, crash the machine, spend endless hours learning how to perform common tasks, or even make their Windows machine unbootable. But these potential Linux users needn't be afraid. Using Linux is far less accident-prone than learning to drive.
This book, along with its accompanying CD, is an excellent way to explore the exciting world of Linux and open source software. The Move CD is a customized version of the popular Mandrake Linux distribution. It runs "on the fly" directly from the CD. There's nothing to install, and all of your computer's data remains perfectly safe. It's like driving a car that you can crash as hard as you want without ever damaging the car or yourself.
Move includes hundreds of applications for just about every type of daily computer task. The CD contains a complete Microsoft Office-compatible office suite called OpenOffice.org. Other programs allow you to surf the Web, create and modify graphics, listen to music, and watch videos. Whatever it is you want to do, you'll probably find an an open source program for it on this CD.
This is not a demonstration CD, nor is it an interactive video, such as those frequently used in software training. Move is a real operating version of Linux that runs from CD instead of from a hard drive. This is truly the easiest way to test-drive Linux.
Linux is a free and open source operating system that you can run on your current PC in place of Microsoft Windows. It was first created by college student Linus Torvalds in 1991. Because Linus made all of his programming code (usually referred to as source code) available to others, Linux has since been further developed by thousands of programmers from around the world. As many people point out, Linux itself is not a complete operating system. In fact, it is only the core of an operating system, known as a kernel . A kernel is combined with many programs, libraries, and utilities to make up an operating system. The GNU project, an organization of programmers and others devoted to creating source code that can be distributed freely, has supplied many of the programs and libraries that combine with the Linux kernel to make a complete operating system. Taking the GNU project into account, many people refer to the operating system based on the Linux kernel as GNU/Linux (pronounced guh-noo'/Lynn'-nucks). Throughout this book, the term Linux refers to the entire open source operating system, unless otherwise stated.
A comparison to a car may help you understand this arrangement better. The kernel can be thought of as the car's engine, transmission, and wheels, while the belts, hoses, frame, pumps, and fuel injectors are supplied by the GNU project. At this point you have a usable car, but it isn't very pretty. KDE (described in a later section) and other graphical environments are the sheetmetal that defines the actual look of the car, as well as the interior and the details that make it comfortable and fun to drive.
What's in a name?
KDE stands for Kool Desktop Environment. While using it, you can't help but notice that the developers like to name their KDE programs so they begin with a K: Kontact, KMail, Konqueror, KWrite, and so on.
Linux is everywhere. More web sites run Linux than Windows, and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. loves Linux so much that it created its own highly secure version called SELinux (and then shared it with everyone). The U.S. Department of Defense uses clusters of Linux servers to run battlefield simulations, and everyone's favorite personal video recorder, TiVo, runs Linux inside (but not on Intel processors). Amazon runs on Linux, and so does Google. And, as this book will teach you, Linux is a free alternative to Microsoft Windows on many desktop computers.
Though you can often get Linux at no cost or for just a few dollars, its "free"-ness does not actually refer to its price. Instead, it means that you should feel free to modify the code that makes up Linux in whatever way you see fit. The only restriction is that in most situations you must share your changes with everyone else, so that they too can benefit from your improvements. Despite what Bill Gates says, this isn't communism. Personally, it makes me think of communities coming together to build a barn, or friends who help you move. They ask nothing in return except for your willingness to return the favor when the time comes.
You will also hear Linux described as an open source program. This recently coined term is meant to make the notion of free software more acceptable to businesses and governments. For some strange reason, businesses think something that costs nothing is worth nothing. What qualifies as open source software is more broadly defined than free software, which means some open source software may not be free software.
Though open source software is the more commonly used term, free software is the traditional one. Many people seeking to encompass both terms use the acronym FOSS, which logically enough stands for Free Open Source Software. For more information about free software, visit http://www.gnu.org; for more information about open source software, visit http://www.opensource.org.
It's important to be aware that Move is just one of several hundred "flavors" of Linux. Each flavor is known as a distribution . You might have already heard of the most popular ones: Red Hat, Mandrake, Novell Suse, and Debian. Different distributions are akin to different car models. When buying a car, you get to choose the model with the look, performance, safety features, and price point that suit you best. Linux distributions give you the same freedom of choice. What a boring world it would be if the only car available was a Ford Focus!
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