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Free software and Linux

This page is an informative collection of links cum rarely updated blog. Certain sections were added a while ago and may not be true anymore but are retained for their historical relevance.

Introduction

This page was initially about Linux, but after much thought, I realized that Free software would be a more accurate title. (Linux is Free software, but that is only part of the story). It is important for people to use and advocate free software and get away from the clutches of monopolistic corporations, who, I think are the single biggest danger to free software today. The first step is awareness about why Free Software and standards are A Good Thing and why Proprietary standards are Bad. Proprietary software is not necessarily bad software, but restrictions placed on viewing or changing the source code is not desirable on a lot of fronts.

There are several eloquent articles on why software should be free (libre) as in free speech (not free beer). I'll refer to them anon, after I have made my point. The "free" in free software refers to freedom or liberty and not the price. I should also mention that there are also raging debates about freedom for software versus freedom for developers and why the GNU GPL is not good.

As we move into a world where software plays an increasingly bigger role in several facets of our daily life, it is important to take a look at the nature of the control that we have over the software as well as the digital data that we create and acquire. It is necessary to ensure that the data that you own is stored in a format that you exercise full control over. This can be done if you store the data in a free and open format which offers the ability as well as the right to read it. If one stores data in a proprietary format, they are forced to buy software from the same vendor in order to read the data. They are completely at the mercy of the vendor to access their data. It is even possible that the vendor takes away your right to read the data. They may deny you the right to use different software to read the data. You are at their mercy. Period. (Think 1984. Well, that may be paranoia, but it is good to bear in mind that prevention is better than cure.)

The same idea is as true of software as it is of our data, though less relevant to the multitude. It is hugely to our advantage if we should have the right to freely access, use and modify both the software and data. This implies that we will have complete and permanent access to the data as well as the means to means to access and modify it. This is especally true of governments. I think that it is the responsibility of governments to ensure that the data and software they use is completely free. The Peruvian government introduced a bill in 2002, in which they set forth certain conditions that the software and data formats procured by the government should follow. A certain monopolistic company put forward reasons (charitably referred to as FUD, as they are attempts to infuse Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt) why Free software is bad which were promptly refuted by a Peruvian Congressman. I think that the bill is dead now. I found some articles that refer to its demise, but don't know the details.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided to use Open Standards for their documents. There is an interesting article about Microsoft's argument against such a scheme.

The following are some links about Free Software.

The article "We Can Put an End to Word Attachments" by Richard Stallman explains why using a proprietary standard is bad for the users as well as the community. There is absolutely no need to use proprietary standards when there is free, cross-platform, quality software to achieve the same tasks.

Microsoft uses all means possible to ensure that many kinds of data are in a proprietary format that can be used only with Microsoft products forcing you to be beholden to Microsoft. They are uniquely placed to force people to do this by leveraging their OS monopoly. Microsoft is obviously interested only in its welfare and doesn't give a damn about the user, and if one continues to use their products, one is at their mercy and that is not a situation I'd like to be in. To quote Mitch Stone "Microsoft is not a company we can trust with our technological future". I think that is putting it mildly. I don't mean to imply that Microsoft is the biggest and most evil company out there; it is one of many others. But given its track record concerning standards and its market dominance, it is well placed to do a lot of harm. I am pretty certain that if Microsoft had a marketshare of less than 50% in the PC segment, technology would have advanced by leaps and bounds. A case in point is Internet explorer, versions 3, 4, 5 and 6 were released in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001. There it ground to a standstill until the Firefox browser started becoming popular and version 7 was released in 2007. Internet Explorer 6 was not a particularly secure browser, was outdated in terms of features in 2004 and has one of the worst track records for following established standards, but no new version was forthcoming until its marketshare was threatened. The conclusions that can be drawn are obvious.

There are other good reasons why Microsoft is not good for consumers. The following are some articles that elaborate on the theme in more detail and more convincingly than I can.

What's new?

OpenDocument and the new document standards

The days of the proprietary office document formats is (hopefully) over. The new OpenDocument standard released by OASIS will, I hope, signal the end of the dominance of a certain vendor who has a stranglehold on the market because of their Office Suite that uses proprietary file formats. There will also be multiple vendors who support the new format. I hear good things about OpenOffice 2.0 which is available for a variety of platforms including MS Windows.

July, 2005: fluxbox with the bells and whistles

I was about to title this write-up "fluxbox revolutions", but it doesn't suck as much as matrix rev. did. i've moved to fluxbox for the time being. what was striking was when i did briefly go back to gnome, the whole thing looked so clunky. fluxbox more than suffices for my humble needs such as multiple workspaces, easy to access and configure drop down menu (which I have grown to love,) weather, cpu usage info on the desktop and a sleek look. I recently checked out torsmo and it beats the hell out of gkrellm, which jarred on me primarily because of the theme conflict. (Now, if I can only get an XMMS theme that didn't look terribly out of place on my desktop.) Besides torsmo is much more configurable than gkrellm is, though fixing weather involves a bit of an effort. I'll put my dot files soon.

May, 2005: Fluxbox, reloaded

Fluxbox is pretty good. Of course, it is not a complete desktop environment, but with some additional programs it suffices. It is certainly faster and in certain instances easier to configure. I have now switched to fluxbox on my work machine as well. Don't think I'll be switching to anything else for a while. Here is a screenshot [416K].

January, 2005: Fluxbox

Been a while since I updated the page. I recently upgraded my laptop to the 2.6 kernel. Certain things still don't work though. However, I was able to repartition my hard disk to better handle gentoo. I had this feeling that Gnome was a bit too heavy for my laptop and decided to try fluxbox, which is yet another window manager for Linux.

April, 2004: Gentoo

The Gentoo PenguinHe he (sheepish grin). Knoppix apparently is Debian. However, I still think if you want a bleeding edge linux distro with minimal pain, Gentoo is the answer. However, Gentoo on a laptop is a different issue. My roommate burnt his laptop (metaphor bordering on the literal) compiling packages. I, myself, wasn't so keenly catching up with the new applications (essentially openoffice). However there are binary installs available for the biggies (mozilla, openoffice). You can also download the /packages/distfiles and do a binary install (emerge -k).

December, 2003: The Debian experience?

Things are going rather smoothly. Gentoo is pretty good, but there are problems, like having to compile packages from source. well, thats not absolutely necessary, but then you won't be able to set too many options. I like the options available (you can install a whole lot of packages with just a few commands), but maintanence is more difficult. I always have an itching to try debian. I probably don't know how best to do it, but package management in Redhat is also painful. Debian is supposed to be good, but configuring the system (even XFree86 for a Compaq PC) is not very easy. I plan to use the Redhat 9 CD to create an XFree86 config file for me. A better option would probably be to use Knoppix. Debian certainly lags behind in auto hardware detection and configuration.

August, 2003: The Gentoo experience

A Gentoo Penguin It all began with the Sony laptop that I got. Obviously I wanted to load Linux on it. Sony, a thousand curses on them, do not support linux much, as it turned out. I installed Redhat 9 on the box. It was rather usable but I couldn't get stuff like sound (a really fishy thing here - got to do with ACPI), wireless card, CD/DVD, etc. Then there were these two guys who installed Gentoo on their R505GLs. As pointed out earlier, I'm no guru in linux, and I don't have the time to sift and sit through documentation and compilations. I tried following their instructions with Redhat 9, but the bloody kernel wouldn't even compile. Meanwhile I noticed that some guys on UMLUG who couldn't stop raving about Gentoo and portage and stuff. So I figured I should try it myself. The documentation is brief but very good. As far as I could see it covered almost everything. Doing the step by step install was fun. (I should say "is" - I started yesterday and its still going on. I've seen Pulp fiction several times before- and hence can't spend my time that way. I read some books, updated this page, went to the MVA, you name it). This compile-everything-from-source process takes time. But other than that this portage stuff seems to be cool. Essentially Gentoos are a breed of penguins that are fast. Gentoo Linux is a metadistribution in that it "provides customization and optimization for any need" and also "extreme performance and configurability". Well, I sure can use that, but I'd be happy for now if I get all the hardware working. When I get more comfortable I'll try it on my desktop, which ought to provide a mean performance. (It is a Intel Xeon 2 x 2GHz processor with 1GB RAM).

Linux

A detailed description from Linux can be found here: What is Linux?

The Official Linux Penguin I am what is referred to as newbie. (I fancy I've grown a bit more sophisticated, but that is based more than other peoples perception than my own.) Therefore, it is too much to expect anything profound on this page. But well, I thought I'd just include some interesting links for starters.

As for my personal opinion. I think of UNIX as possessing "of unusual simplicity, power, and elegance....". And Linux is nothing but a better (from the freedom and the desktop point of view, and not in absolute terms) version of UNIX. There are several reasons in favour of Linux as an operating system. In no particular order they are as follows.

  • It is free in every sense of the word. Or if you prefer a commercial distribution, it is cheap. Considering that you get so many applications along with the distribution that is something.
  • It is highly customizable and offers an extremely efficient UNIX-like environment which, once you get used to, is impossible to substitute with something like Windows.
  • It is quite stable and fairly secure. Remember that Linux is based on UNIX which is arguably the best OS and has been around for 30 years.
  • It is highly customizable for those who want to do it and are suitably qualified.
  • It is based on open standards, which means anybody can easily write applications for linux. And people certainly have- there are numerous applications out there for Linux.

Admittedly, it is probably not for everybody. The ease of installation, use and administration is less for Linux than say Microsoft Windows, but Linux is getting there. I think, the installation for some distros is pretty good and quite easy. It is mostly the configuration which is not quite that easy.

The distinctions between Free Software, Open Source and freely available software are not obvious (In fact some of these terms are ambiguously used. Here is a more complete and detailed list). I was a bit muddled myself initially. Freeware is available free, but you don't know how it works and you do not have freedom to use it as you like. Open Source (literally) is slightly better; you can take a peep at the source code but you still can't modify it. Free Software is the best: you can see the source code for yourself, modify it as you please and distribute as many copies as you want. However, you may have to pay a price for it. For Linux this price is usually nominal and usually covers not much more than the cost of distribution and support. To make one final clarification, commercial software can be Free Software. Some distributions of Linux are Commercial Software.

What is unix?

http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/
http://www.internet-history.org/archives/early.history.of.unix.html

Linux programs

Where can you find a linux equivalent for program X? What are the multimedia players available in linux? What HTML editors are available in linux? Well if you are using gentoo you can have a look at the ebuilds page. Gentoo comes with a staggering 6746 (4/25/2004) packages that you can install with the flick of a wrist (it might take a little while to compile though). But if you just want to take a look at the options, take a look at the following websites.

Resources

Documentation

News and Information

Some popular distributions

  • Ubuntu Linux
  • Gentoo Linux
  • Debian Linux
  • The Slackware Linux Project
  • Fedora Project
  • Redhat Linux
  • SuSE Linux
  • Mandriva
  • Knoppix: KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

Last updated Feb 17, 2007.

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