Re: Introduction to Linux for Chris

[Tim Chase <blinux list thechases com>]

Welcome, Chris, to the list.

> Can I have some information on Linux's opperation?

[phony accent] vell dis opperation kan be wary difficult, as ve 
plan to extract schom schpace on hard disken and putten in a bit 
of der Linuxen.  (grins)

No, really...it works, and there's a whole list of folks here to 
help.  It, much like Windows, is acutally fairly boring for your 
average Joe.  What matters are the applications, and how easily 
you can use them.

> Is it totally command line based?

It can be.  I've got one of my boxes (an old P133 laptop) set up 
to run in only command-line.  I find it fast, as I've been using 
the command-line for years.  It's one of those things that with 
experience, you may never want to go back.  There's also a GUI 
portion which is, like everything else in Linux, customizable to 
the Nth degree.  There is some screen-reader software--the GNOME 
project has Gnopernicus and the KDE project has their own (the 
name escapes me at the moment) but last I heard, they're still 
about on par with MS Narrator.  If you have some sight, you can 
tweak your XFree86 configuration to display in a much 
lower/magnified resolution and take advantage of the built-in 
panning provided by X's virtual desktops.  You can crank the 
graphics back to 640x480, 320x200, or even lower, yet give it a 
virtual desktop of 1024x768 or even higher.  X takes care of all 
the panning details.  You just ram your mouse against the edge of 
the screen, and it does the rest. (grins)

> is it still open-source? 

Yep...always has been, always will be.  That's the beauty of the 
GPL (General Public License)

> If so, what language?

This is a bit ambiguous...do you mean programming language or 
spoken/written language?  If it's spoken/written language, Linux 
supports far more languages than I speak.  Some distros are 
customized for a particular language.

If, however, you're talking about programming languages, there 
are so many, it would be impossible to enumerate them all. 
However, for low-level and huge apps, often C or C++ is used.  In 
addition, there's Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Lisp, PHP, 
shell-scripts, TCL/TK, and surely piles more I'm forgetting.  For 
my personal spin, I prefer to avoid C/C++ when I can, in the same 
way I avoid assembly programming at work. (grins)  For 
application development, I lean towards Java or Python.  For web 
development, I'm a PHP guy, though Python has its appeal on that 
front as well.  For some reason, Perl just drives me nuts.

> Where can I get either the source or bineries
> from pleasE? and how do I install.

Well, if you truely want to install, you can download any of the 
ISO images for any number of distributions, or ISOs modified by 
blinuxy folk, to make them more accessible.  I think there's a 
modified Fedora Core boot ISO that's been tweaked so that the 
speakup kernel is loaded by default.

As an alternative, if you just want to test the waters first 
without actually installing, there are a number of boot-from-cd 
distributions such as Knoppix.  One of its derivatives, Oralux 
(http://www.oralux.org), has been specially tweaked to provide an 
accessible environment from bootup without the need to install. 
This might be a good place to start.  In addition, you'll likely 
want to read some docs on getting started with Linux, as it 
sounds like you've not been steeped in the Linux/Unix world, thus 
absorbing it in passing.  I'd recommend some of your first stops 
to be:

The Linux Documentation Project:
http://www.tldp.org

The Linux Cookbook (one of my favorite resources for command-line 
tools; very biased towards Debian-based distributions, but that's 
okay, as I use Debian and its derivatives such as Knoppix) which 
can be found at:
http://dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_toc.html

Hopefully that's enough to get you started.  The list is here and 
there are plenty of smart folks to help you out.

-tim