Linux

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Lindsayt
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Linux

Unread post by Lindsayt »

I've been dabbling with Linux lately.

Ubuntu Server 18.04. With the aim being to set up and host my own web server & email server.

So far I've been enjoying it, in a techie, hairshirt, masochistic kind of way.
I haven't really used Unix since writing my final year degree project in vi. And the command line interface reminds me of the first computer I used: the 1970's Word Processing mini / mainframe computer where my dad worked.

I see large parallels between Microsoft and Unix / Linux and the Linn / Naim Flat Earth bullshit, as discussed in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=49929

I've never been a big fan of Microsoft and have always seen them as the triumph of marketing over technical excellence.

Anyway, for a job like web hosting, I can see why so many of the World's websites are hosted on Linux.

.....It's free! :dance:
.....There's a lot of perfectly good or good enough software for Linux that's free! :dance: :dance:
.....It's fast. :clap:
.....It's stable. :geek:
.....It doesn't require the latest fancy hardware with loads of RAM to work well. :grin:
.....It is, reputedly, more secure than Windows. :drool:
.....There are fewer Linux viruses than Windows viruses. :geek: Although it's still sensible to take appropriate security precautions. :doh:
.....Installing software is very quick and easy. Thanks to the repositories. Or is it suppositries? :grin:

For a server we don't need no Graphical User Interface. We want it to sit in the corner, 24/7 and just serve out data.

The biggest downside is the learning curve for someone like me that's been stuck in the Windows paradigm for years. But as I said, I've sort of been enjoying that in a teaching an old dog new tricks kind of way.

Another downside is that you're interacting with the computer in a very direct kind of way. Type the wrong thing and you can muck things up. But in a way I quite like that. None of this "Are you sure you want to go ahead and do that" hand holding. The computer just gets straight on with what you tell it to do.

I just wish Linux with Mariadb and PHP had been available - for free! - when I was starting out on my career and knocking up a specialised stock control database on the stupid wank Paradox PC based system that my idiot of a boss at the time thought was the bees knees after he read a PC magazine review on it. :grin:

Lurcher300b
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Re: Linux

Unread post by Lurcher300b »

You miss the most important thing that is the reason for all of your reasons. Its Open.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Gener ... ic_License

"which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software"

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terrybooth
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Re: Linux

Unread post by terrybooth »

Yes. A complete diversion from the mainstream of this symposium but...

Richard Stallman's definition of free was Free - not as in Free Beer, Free as in Freedom. (Free as in Freedom). And he's (and the GNU License he helped invent) pretty much the father of the Open software movement. (Linus Torvalds succeeded where Stallman failed to create and open *nix platform which, as the OP says, underpins most of the intenet, mobile phone operating systems and the music streamers many of us like to use.)

Are there parallels. Maybe, by I don't think that it's flat earth vs the rest so much as comparing the early days of hi-fi (Wireless World and such as documented by the Doc) with the early days of software development. Stalman's journey started when he discovered that he hard no access to the code which drove a printer and he couldn't therefore insert a simple bit of code to warn that there was a paper jam (if I recall). He asked for the code and was told he couldn't have it because it belonged to the printer manufacturer). Stallman basically thought this was wrong and set about to change it.

In the meantime companies took Unix, which had originally been an academic research project, and created their own proprietary brands, then more hobbysits created Hewlett Packard, Apple and Microsoft who followed that proprietary path. But today even Microsoft claims to be open source.

I think as the Doc and Steve have shown recently, their has pretty much always been a hobbyist element to developing hi-fi and that element has always been open source (eg.sharing amplifying schematics). Similar, but different.
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Lurcher300b
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Re: Linux

Unread post by Lurcher300b »

where Stallman failed to create and open *nix platform
Well, not entirely true, while the GNU Kernel (Hurd) is sill WIP, The Linux Kernel would not have been the success it was without the GNU user space libraries and tools.

Also vitally important was Eric Raymond's essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as a codification of the open source ethos.
academic research project
Well, again, not entirely correct, Bell Labs was very much commercial.

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Lindsayt
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Re: Linux

Unread post by Lindsayt »

Lurcher300b wrote: Sat Mar 30, 2019 9:15 am You miss the most important thing that is the reason for all of your reasons. Its Open.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Gener ... ic_License

"which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software"
Yes that's true. It's the free, as in liberal nature of Linux that allows me, as a consumer to get updated versions of the operating system and a reasonable variety of free, as in no money to spend, applications.

It is an environment where you are sticking two fingers up at the Microsoft / Apple corporate IT world.

In 2001 I worked with a colleague who was seen as a bit of an off the wall eccentric because he was into Linux and had moral reservations about using Microsoft products. He also wouldn't step inside a McDonalds. At the time we all knew he was right. We just didn't join in with his principles.

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terrybooth
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Re: Linux

Unread post by terrybooth »

Hope Lurcher will forgive my gloss on Linux development. Indeed GNU - Gnu's Not Unix - is still a work in progress and, as I understand it, based on a very different approach to Operating System Development than Linux.

And I stand corrected about the beginnings of Unix.
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Re: Linux

Unread post by _D_S_J_R_ »

Not in my skillset at all, but my ancient late noughties Dell laptop seized up on Windows 10 all too often (display hardware not up to it mainly), so I 'updated' to a slightly newer one better able to cope with page scrolling and he took the previous machine and put Linux Mint on it to have a play. His studies have taken priority since the first play, but he did seem very impressed with 'Mint' as it's quite a friendly interface (he thought).
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Lurcher300b
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Re: Linux

Unread post by Lurcher300b »

Hope Lurcher will forgive my gloss on Linux development. Indeed GNU - Gnu's Not Unix - is still a work in progress and, as I understand it, based on a very different approach to Operating System Development than Linux.
Again, you have to differentiate Hurd (The GNU Kernel) with is a microkernel type. But when someone is using Linux they are most likely doing it via a set of utilities written by GNU. The command line you talked about is not Linux, its written by GNU, the standard C library that just about everything uses, is not Linux, it by GNU. And so on. The correct term for the system is GNU/Linux. Nobody that is not a programmer (and not most of them nowadays) talks directly with Linux.

Its a picky point, but being accurate is good sometimes :-)

Oh, and BTW, all Android phones and tablets are running Linux.

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Re: Linux

Unread post by slinger »

Lurcher300b wrote: Sat Mar 30, 2019 3:48 pm ...but being accurate is good sometimes :-)
From those far-off days of writing SQL on a SCO Unix box being accurate is definitely good, otherwise, quite often, bugger all happens, and you're left wondering why. :lol:
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Re: Linux

Unread post by applemarc »

Now all Apple computer run under Unix and have done since 2001
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