Getting Started with Linux --
A Personal History

This article was contributed by Gerald Strom, professor in political science and non-geek.

The image of the Linux penguin, Tux, is copyright Larry Ewing (lewing@isc.tamu.edu) and was created using the Linux drawing tool, The GIMP.

It took me years, but I finally took the plunge and installed Linux on both my home and office machines. It's been about a year now since I made this momentous decision and I've never regretted it.

I resisted making this change for many years because MS Windows did most of what I wanted my computer to do. I could happily write books and articles with it, do email, explore the Web (professors don't surf), and crunch some numbers from time to time. So why would I want to change? As well, what did I know, I'm a political scientist, not a computer wiz, and maybe Linux was even worse than Windows. I knew that Linux is really Unix, the system that runs most of the Internet, so it must do something good if all the computer geeks like it. But was it for me?

But while I could do about everything I wanted in Windows, what worried me most was security. Almost every week there seems to be a new Windows virus or worm out there and the antivirus software can't always keep up. Moreover, as my office computer was directly connected to the Web, would someone find a backdoor someplace on it to come through and wipe out my hard drive or do other damage? Windows is an inherently insecure operating system and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

Even this did not lead me to make a change, however, as I was not willing to completely give up one system for a system I thought might be better but might not be. But then I heard about fips.exe, a simple, easy to use, little DOS program that partitions your hard disk without destroying anything. To use it, you first defragment your hard disk under Windows so that all the Windows stuff is in the first set of tracks. Then you run fips.exe to create an entirely new partition on the latter tracks (and you can specify how much to allocate to each partition). Windows continues to run just like it always did but now I had space for a new operating system, Linux, which allows me to boot either at will. Linux will run with about four gigabytes of disk space but I found that ten is better and is adequate for all my needs.

What you then find is that there is a large number of different Linux versions, some designed for the computer wiz crowd and some designed for ordinary people like me. As the biggest one of the latter was Red Hat, I figured I would give it a try. So I purchased Red Hat 7.1 at Best Buy for about $39.00 and began installing it on my two machines. What a breeze that was. Put in the CD disks, answer a few questions when prompted, and I had it up and running in about forty-five minutes.

Now I would see what it could do. First and most importantly, it has a windows program called X (not 10, X), which looks and operated much like MS Windows with point and click to run programs. And it has considerably more power that MS Windows as I simultaneously have four desk tops that I can switch back and forth between as I work. There was a small learning curve, but after a couple of days I felt very secure using my new system.

And then there is security: Unix systems like Linux are not perfectly secure but they are much more secure than MS Windows machines (for the paranoid, you can even get a kernel, the key operating system component, from the National Security Agency (NSA) which is really secure). Under Linux, each file has three permissions -- read, write and execute -- and you can control each of them for all the files on the system. So if I didn't want anyone to read my email posts to the Provost, I can set it so only I can read these files. And by strictly controlling write access, I can keep hackers from putting viruses on my system and messing it up. And not only can I open or close all the external ports, I can limit who has access to the open ports. Once, for example, I discovered that several different people from Germany were trying to mess with my Web server, so I banned all Germans from the system. Currently, the French and Italians are also excluded as are people coming from a Web address that ends with novacon.net; mess with me and I shut you out.

Some of this is probably unnecessary as not many hackers write viruses for Linux machines, but it sure feels good to know that the capability is there and easy to use if you need it.

What I also discovered after I got it up and running is that there is really good software out there for Linux. My favorite is Star Office, a free office suite from Sun Microsystems, which I think is as good or better than the Word Suite from Microsoft. In fact, the word processing component can read and write Word documents, the spreadsheet can read and write Excel spreadsheets, and I can use it to make slides just as easily as with Powerpoint. And, of course, Netscape and a wide variety of other browsers are available. (I really like Galeon.) And for email, there are several that mimic Eudora without the latter's faults. So far, in fact, I have always found good software to do whatever I wanted to do. Moreover, most of it is free; just download and install it.

But you know the really best part? Linux doesn't hang up, ever. I have been running Linux now for about a year and the only time the system went down was because of a power failure in BSB (and of course, it recovered from that immediately after the power was restored). And that's running seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with hundreds of students using the Web server I put up on it.

Would I go back? No way. Why would I want to? I have a pretty secure system now and all the tools I need. The downside, however, is that the computer center currently does not support Linux so if you have a problem, you cannot take it to them. But there is a Linux listserv running on campus and I have found that if I have problems, I can post them there and get solutions back. There really are a lot of well-informed people on campus who know how to run Linux systems, and they seem very willing to help.

Gerald Strom, UIC Professor in Political
Science, and non-geek.