Fri, 13 Apr 2007

Learning Linux?

I was amazed and indeed almost disappointed at the number of people that have approached me this week and asked “how to get started in Linux?”. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t actually have a ready answer. Conference wise I tend to hang around with people who long ago found their way [to Unix and from there] to Linux, and so had not given a lot of thought to answering the baseline question of where to start!

Luckily I had another keynote to give on the next day of the conference, so I had time to get my shit together. I prempted the beginning of my second presentation to try and address the question. I told them this:

1. Read a book about Linux
2. Install Linux on your computer
3. Talk to people, and ask for help
4. Not necessarily in that order

Install Linux

I drew up a graphic to give an overview of the lay of the land distro-wise, throwing in a few other flavours of Unix as well:

[The trend line shown there is something that occurred to me a while ago. It seems for a long time there was a clear inverse relationship between how easy something is to install versus how easy it is to maintain and upgrade over time. Ubuntu, of course, breaks the mould by making Debian easy to install, but it still isn’t as easy to maintain (from the standpoint of a power user) as a Gentoo system is. This graphic actually worked quite well as a backdrop to discussing the emergence of distros over time and the evolution of network aware dependency based packaging systems]

Read a book about it

And suggested a book for them to look up. The best one I could think of was Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh’s Running Linux, now 5th edition, published by O’Reilly [one thing that’s great about Bangalore is that there are like seventeen million bookstores all full to the brim with O’Reilly books].

To the blogoverse I ask: what book would you recommend to someone to a young university student who has caught the fire of enthusiasm and wants to get started in open source?

AfC

mukthi-2007-learning-linux, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/conferences/india at 14:30, 13 Apr 2007.

Get used to thinking for yourself

Bernard Golden writes:

Fifth, open source. This doesn’t mean occasionally considering it. And it definitely doesn’t mean evaluating it by the standards of how you’ve done things with proprietary software … People criticize open source because it doesn’t “deliver business value.” What they typically mean is that they’re used to letting the vendor do their job of deciding what their infrastructure should look like, then providing them a roadmap of their infrastructure development plans, and then pre-integrating the solution with the vendor’s favored software partners. So, naturally, when you look at open source, it fails to do that. No open source vendor is going to do a dog-and-pony show and then build your proof-of-concept [for you] to get you committed to their solution. Instead of asserting that open source doesn’t deliver business value, run an experiment. Find out for yourself what the costs of doing open source are. And besides, as open source economics eats away at the margins of proprietary vendors … they’ll do less of the legwork for you. So get used to thinking for yourself.

I really like this. For all the FOSS cheerleading I do, I don’t normally get embroiled in proprietary vs open source debates, and I hadn’t really thought of the point that Bernard makes here: one of the biggest reasons that people will resist change is because there are many who want their answers handed to them on a silver platter.

AfC

bernard-golden-on-thinking-for-yourself, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/operations/enterprise at 12:48, 13 Apr 2007.

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