| wIndependence Day Essay: Transition to Linux |
by D. L. Tai Sines (August 1, 2002)
When my boss announced a little over a year ago that each of us in our unit (I work in the IT section of a veterinary teaching hospital) was to begin familiarizing ourselves with Linux to facilitate an eventual migration to that OS, I thought he was crazy. I'd been around PCs since DOS 1.x, but had little idea of what Open-Source even was. As I put it in our meeting, 'It's a Windows world'.
Or, so I thought at the time. But, my boss was adamant and has a history of being right, so I grudgingly installed Red Hat 7.1 on a castoff computer and began my journey. The first thing I found out was that I wasn't the 'computer expert' I thought I was. My 'expertise' revolved completely around the Microsoft environment. It was a revelation to discover a whole world of computing that had escaped me up until then. The second thing I found was that I was NOT running with Linux. I was not walking. I was barely figuring out how to crawl and that's about it. My mother-in-law was taking an adult ed. computer class, learning how to do stuff like issue the "dir" command. I figured I was about at the same level as her with Linux. It was very humbling. But, it was also exciting to begin to learn about something new, particularly since folks I knew who knew about Unix/Linux tended to be very enthusiastic about it.
So, I looked online for how-tos and tutorials, I read man pages, I bothered co-workers who were more knowledgeable than me, I took classes offered on the campus where I work. I made a list of commands that I used often and directories where important files were located. Little by little, and more and more, functionality returned within a Linux context. And, as it did, I began to see why Linux is, in a word, better.
One of the things about Linux that is hard to get used to is that there are practically no limits. It is possible to do almost anything, though it may take some work to figure out how. One of the things that I've been able to accomplish is to set up a Linux server so that I can SSH into it remotely from Windows or Linux. When I log in, my particular share on an NT server is mounted and available for secure file transfer. When I log out the share is unmounted from the server. This is such an improvement over VPN, FTP, etc.
I am now running Red Hat 7.3, KDE 3.0, Kmail, Mozilla 1.0 and Open Office. This OS and these apps serve about 80% of my desktop needs. And they were all free. As a subscriber to Red Hat Network, critical and other updates to my system take place automatically and without charge. It could barely get better than this.
So, what about the other 20%? John Dvorak, in his PC Magazine column, recently said that Linux won't make it as a desktop OS until one can run Dreamweaver and Photoshop on it. I've lived without Photoshop thus far – I use Paint Shop Pro and could probably survive with The Gimp -- but Dreamweaver is a must-have for web design and maintenance. Also, KPilot is getting there, but still isn't as functional as the Palm/Windows app. Similar comments about Cervisia compared to winCVS. Also, some browser plug-ins are only available for Win/Mac OSs.
But this is a short list. And it's a list that has gotten a lot shorter in the relatively small amount of time that I've been involved with Linux. A little more functionality on a much more stable platform with a lot more options at a much lower cost is a winning combination that can't be competed with without a radical shift in the way the world looks at PC computing.
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Please note: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the writer, not of the management or staff of DesktopLinux.com.
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