Written to allow creator
Linus Torvalds
to understand how commodity
networking-capable PCs worked,
Linux was
introduced to the public
in August 1991 - making it just over 17 years old. Taken to heart
by developers and Independent Software Vendors the world over,
fed by the growing popularity of the World Wide Web and borrowing
many disparate ideas in computer science, ultimately running on
everything from mainframes and
supercomputers
to
"netbook"s
and mobile phones
(Google Android),
Linux is widely respected by many and yet remains strangely
misunderstood by others.
Command-line a necessity
In common with modern commercial operating systems, Linux is
compliant with many of the
Portable Operating System Interface
standards. Notably, this compliance
conveyed security features
yet to be built into
the Windows NT Architecture
at the time, and a requirement to supply several command line
utilities for validating their
presence and functionality.
Latterly, both Windows and Unix
are required to have this - a fact
overlooked by critics who dismiss
Linux as stuck in the past,
supposedly uniquely tied to command
line roots.
The rapid development of Linux
was initially thanks to a
burgeoning open source movement,
and Torvalds was able to grace
his system both command line and
GUI facilities within just over a year from inception. The rich, mature, and widely familiar
command set
that had been evolving on Unix since 1968 came from the
Gnu's Not Unix project (which had
been recreating the Unix environment in open source form since 1983), and GUI support from
The XFree86 Project's 1992
free-as-in-speech implementation of the X Window System (which
was debuted by MIT in 1984 and would eventually underlie the
4Dwm
GUI that prompts the infamous but technically correct exclamation
"this is Unix! I know this!"
in
Jurassic Park).
Latterly there was interest from
commercial companies, as the
ever-increasing list of supported
hardware attests. Due to the
command line and GUI features,
Linux was interoperable with every POSIX compliant system that predated it almost from the
outset - and several of its peers.
As Simple as Possible, but No Simpler
Unix, designed to run on a PDP-7
system with just 8K of RAM, wasn't originally capable of supporting
programs as we think of them today:
ones that run comfortably alongside
many others, and with swathes of
self-contained functionality and elaborate interfaces built in.
Instead, in accordance with
the
KISS principle,
its programs were lightweight, had
well defined interfaces,
and while sharing little other functionality in common were
designed
to interact with one another in flexible ways.
Not only was the emergence of complex behaviours possible as a result, programs which handled
complicated and unanticipated problems would be easy to deliver
as and when systems became suitably powerful - and still are. In competing system
designs, the absence of a feature in an application (and
non-availability of the code to do something about that) is often
the end of the story.
By far the greatest advantage of Unix's design is the ability of the
end user to extend the system as desired. This "characteristic
malleability" permeates the design of its GUI facilities as well as
the command line, and this has
allowed
many UI styles to be built from those on early CAD
workstations, through the Gnome/KDE implementations seen on
conventional developer machines today, to
ultraportable
touchscreen PDAs and multiuser
"surface computing"
systems - each differentiating the product line to which it belongs
and driving sales of it.
Media Misconceptions
...but back to the present. With the current phenomenon of netbooks
aimed at
the developing world
and
the developing mind,
how it was that the BBC's Gary Parkinson overlooked the
intended UK schools market of the EeePC and the fact the
most-Windows-like
Linux
distribution
is ready and waiting under the hood of the Asus EeePC is anyone's guess. In
his article "Getting to Grips with Linux", he nevertheless
wails at
intentional design features
such as a simplistic UI
("designed by a four year old with a fat crayon") and difficulty
installing non-standard software (which [emphasis mine]
"requires you to open up a "terminal window" and actually
type text"). He overlooks (or was
unaware of) two things: a)
Asus differentiates their product with a separate
advanced (classic style) desktop mode
and have a forthcoming
touchscreen Eee
that Easy Mode suits so well Microsoft
want to emulate it in Windows by the
end of the year
(see video here),
and b) Asus never claimed that
"Debian derived" means "Debian
compatible", and makes a
Software
Development Kit
available to compensate.
The evidently-more-visionary
Stephen Fry
sagely acknowledges in
his review
that public acceptance will come
more readily if
familiar elements of both worlds
are combined - i.e. it's a good thing
the Eee tries not to directly "cater
for the power user but, while file
management is basic for the average person, tuxheads (Linux experts) can go
straight to terminal mode and do their stuff".
Here's to the Future, Now
With businesses as Microsoft's
primary market, the biggest strength
of Windows is undoubtedly the extent
to which upgrades are generally held
not to disrupt continued use of
existing in-house intranet sites
and applications. Linux, like Unix,
has so far relied largely on source compatibility, meaning its ability to
run the same programs you always have
-whether in-house or not-
is little more effort than a
trivially-automated rebuild away.
Furthermore, with software/projects
like
Versora
and WiNE
(available commercially as
CrossOver
and Cedega),
you're no longer stuck if you've got Windows binaries
you want to run, or simply seek a
familiar-looking working
environment. Given the will to
cover license costs for interoperability's sake,
modern Linux machines feature Windows Media compatibility
through
MPlayer,
Microsoft Office compatibility through
OpenOffice,
and -for all the good things it's worth- better
binary compatibility between vendors' products courtesy of the
LSB.
Apple's MacOS X ably demonstrates that a well configured
Unix type system
can underlie a successful, usable, modern desktop OS; modern Linux
was recently described as
what Windows promised to be
and what Unix should have been. If Linux's vendors can get over the
desire to rush products onto shelves, avoiding
failure to match software to hardware,
badly configured applications,
battery issues,
and so forth, then the world could well be Tux's oyster
- though you may read somewhere that he prefers herring. That much has
never been in doubt.
