Pradeep Padala's blog

In this post, I am using Linux to refer not only to the kernel but also to all the programs that come bundled with it. In short, I am using Linux as a short form for a typical Linux distribution.

Long long ago in 1998, in my sophomore year, I used to work as an assitant to the system administrator. Well, I was never paid for that job as there is no money from the university for that kind of jobs. Anyway, I voluteered myself to help him with installation etc. I was new to computers and wanted to learn something out of this.

We got some brand new kick-ass 100MHz pentiums with 500MB hard disks and he wanted to install Linux in half of them. The other half get the mother of all problems Windows 98. Everyone was excited at the prospect of touching the state-of-the-art machines and software. We were going to install Slackware 3.5. He gave me two floppies and asked me to insert the floppies one after another and go through the installation. He showed me how to do it by choosing the NFS installation. I had no clue what NFS meant. I was just reading the first few chapters of a C programming book then. Magically, the network installation proceeded and he then showed how to configure networking. The IP address, routes blah blah blah. Then, he asked me to install it on other machines. Without knowing what IP address meant, I was configuring other machines. It was a real thrill, looking at the curses based installation program install everything gracefully and greeting with a login prompt.

So, I had the root !!! I slowly started learning about UNIX. I didn’t read any books, but somehow I stumbled upon the man pages. Someone mentioned that I should start from man man. It was a lot of fun reading on those 80×40 character terminals and I slowly got the hang of UNIX. Then, I wanted to configure X and was introduced to the brutal world of Linux configuration. Ha, I don’t remember how many hours I dumped to configure X and other parts of Linux. But, I think all those countless hours have given me solid understanding of UNIX without ever reading a book.

Fast forward to 2005. I am sitting in front of this 3GHz, 1GB machine with Fedora Core 3. A lot has changed from 1998. Installing Linux is extermely easy now. I yearn for the days when I partitioned with fdisk during installation. The Linux desktop is now much more usable and can be used by a non-programmer for day-to-day activities. I used to be a die-hard fan of command line, but now I use the Redhat system-config GUIs to configure. GUI applications for Linux have become much more polished. I used to use Pine for a long time to check my e-mail. Now, I use Thunderbird. It has everything Pine got and more. A lot of thought has been put into GUI design and the menus, dialog boxes, tabs are quite intutive and well desgined. Upgrading/Updating Linux system is also pretty easy. I used to gripe about the rpm hell that Redhat created. Now, we have yum. Upgrading with yum is a breeze now. The first time I used it for a major upgrade was to upgrade from FC2 to FC3. I was supicious that something will fail, but all I had to do was yum upgrade and watch the magic. The new generation of Linux applications have made life a lot easier even for UNIX junkies like me. Creating images for my papers has always been a mess. I used to use xfig and the interface was non-intuitive to me. I got the work done, but never felt comfortable with it. I tried Word, but converting Word images to eps is a lot of pain and the images don’t look that good. Now, we have the almighty OpenOffice. I exclusively use OpenOffice Draw nowadays as it has options for exporting to almost any format and the eps exported images look flawless.

I can go on like this forever. To conclude, Linux has gone a long way and for a programmer it provides a host of powerful and flexible tools. For a non-programmer, it comes very close to Windows, and if companies like Dell pick up Linux for desktops, it can even surpass Windows.