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 Linux
Red Hat 9
By DANIEL CALLOWAY,
TheWorldJournal.com
I am, by profession, a Microsoft Windows(tm) Professional. However, in
light of recent and growing number and complexity of Internet Worms and
viruses that attack many desktop platforms and Servers in the wild that
depend on MS Windows, I have turned my attention to a UNIX-based operating
system called Linux.
Linux was the brainchild of Linus Torvalds, who developed this operating
system while he was a student of the University of Helsinki in Finland
back in 1991. At the time of its development, the operating system that
was being used by most of industry and the world of science was UNIX.
However, this powerful operating system had one particular drawback. It
was very expensive. Therefore, Linus decided that he would design an
operating system based on the principles of UNIX that was cheaper to run
and not as difficult to understand and use as the only UNIX derivative of
the day, namely, Minix. From this concept, Linus developed the first Linux
kernel and, with the assistance of the general public through open source
development through present day, Linux was honed into an operating system
with the reputation of being both inexpensive and extremely reliable.
Until now, the only real disadvantage that Linux had was its lack of a
real, user-friendly GUI, or, Graphical User Interface. This has been, for
the most part, overcome with the development of the KDE and Gnome
interfaces. Both of these GUIs are found in Red Hat Linux 9.0 and
Enterprise Edition 3.X . The current ISO distribution of Linux Red Hat 9
comes in a 3-CD set with support costing around $39.00 US. Red Hat Linux,
headquartered in the Raleigh Research Triangle in North Carolina, has
recently announced that it will discontinue support of the desktop version
of Linux with the release of version 9.0 and kernel 2.0.40-16. Red Hat is
concentrating its efforts on its Enterprise Edition 3.X, which is the
network operating version of Linux designed specifically for the corporate
rather than the private sector.
Linux, unlike Windows, uses a hierarchical tree or folder structure. There
are no logical drive labels in Linux such as drive A or C, etc. Instead,
Linux arranges its structure to form a tree with root at the apex. Some
folders or directories are etc, bin, var, usr, sbin, home, etc. Drives are
mounted when used and unmounted when not in use at the directory /mnt.
Linux was a phenomenon waiting to happen. The computer industry suffered
from a rift. In the 1980s and 1990s, people had to choose between
inexpensive, market-driven PC operating systems from Microsoft and
expensive, technology-driven operating system such as UNIX. Free software
was being created all over the world, but lacked a common plaform to rally
around. Linux has become that common platform.
Red Hat Linux is the most popular commercial distribution of Linux. Red
Hat and other commercial distributions, such as Caldera's OpenLinux, have
taken the Linux concept a step further. With Red Hat Linux, users no
longer have to download, compile, and check Linux source code to make sure
that all the right pieces are put together for Linux to work. Basically,
Red Hat has made it possible for Linux to be used by people other than
computer geeks.
Red Hat Linux has also made Linux a more viable alternative for corporate
users. Many companies have felt insecure about relying on a free operating
system to handle their critical data. With Red Hat Linux, they can rely on
Red Hat, Inc. to provide tested versions of that software and technical
support if there are problems.
To date, I have installed and configured the following servers in Linux
which all run simultaneously on my Linux system: Webmin Server, Usermin
Server, Mailman Server & QMail, MySQL Server, Apache Web Server 2.0.40 (or
the standard http daemon in Red Hat Linux 9), vsFTPd Server, and Samba
Server (for file sharing between a Windows system and Linux). The total
cost of installation and licensing for these server-based systems was
$0.00. The cost of setting comparable servers up on a single PC in Windows
is astronomical, not the least of which is the licensing cost to support
these server systems.
I am hosting my own website on my Apache Webserver in Linux. A future
project of mine is to incorporate PHP and MySQL into the Apache Web Server
2.0.40 that I have setup on my Linux system such that I can host a phpBB2
bulletin board. This bulletin board service requires both PHP and MySQL
running and configured to Apache. You can read more about Linux in a
publication entitled, "Red Hat Linux 9 Bible," by Christopher Negus, ISBN:
0764539388. This paperback edition, by John Wiley & Sons Publishing, is
1104 pages and retails for $34.99 in the US.
If you think you might be interested in Linux as a desktop or network
operating system, drop me an email and I can give you some information on
how to acquire this fascinating Operating System and how to get real
online support.
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