EXPAND YOUR LINUX KNOWLEDGE Focusing on the core functionality built into every Linux distribution, these tomes contain a wealth of information on everything from the kernel, to core services, to networking and printing issues. Find your way around the command line functionality, so that your Linux install works the way you want it to. You won't be an expert overnight, but it will certainly lead you in the right direction. Dowload your Linux tips today.

Lindows is led by Michael Robertson, founder and former CEO of mp3.com. With his talented team of developers, Robertson brought the issue of online music into the mainstream, providing both a distribution channel and an open forum for artists around the world. With the ideals of a revolutionary, Robertson came under fire from the music industry both personally and legally, culminating in his departure from mp3.com in mid-2001. His model to remove the middleman from the music industry clearly posed a threat to the status quo. The entertainment industry has since exercised considerable muscle to take control of every possible distribution and royalty channel. As an alternative to Napster that was much more palatable to the masses, mp3.com and Robertson were wildly successful in raising awareness of the entertainment industry's poor treatment of its artists.

Lindows arose shortly after Robertson's departure from mp3.com. With no less revolutionary zeal, Robertson attacked the Microsoft licensing juggernaut by creating a company he felt could be a serious contender for the Microsoft personal desktop space. With yet another team of talented developers behind him, Robertson began crafting a Linux-based solution that could painlessly move users from the grip of Microsoft to the freedom of open source. Lindows was to be the best of all worlds - an open source operating system that ran Windows apps. Easy to install. Painless configuration and updates. With the heavy lifting done by open source code, Lindows could even potentially drive down the cost of computing by eliminating the onerous fees and restrictions of the Microsoft licensing model.

By virtue of his mp3.com exposure, Robertson was a well-regarded and closely-followed tech figure at the inception of Lindows. With a single press release announcing his arrival at Lindows, he once again captured both the ear and the collective imagination of the tech industry. Media coverage and debate followed his Lindows announcement with many in the tech industry clearly in his corner.

Not so with Microsoft. A thinly veiled trademark infringement suit quickly followed the arrival of Lindows, the primary claim of which is that the Lindows name is too similar to Windows. The suit lingers on in some form to this day. It was a strategy Robertson was all to familiar with; using legal muscle and expense to drag the development of a potentially threatening product to a halt.

Shortly after the suit was filed, Lindows changed in two substantive ways, one subtle and one potentially catastrophic. First, Lindows quietly became LindowsOS. To the average Joe, it's a difference of only two letters. To trademark lawyers on the business end of an infringement suit, it can mean the difference between winning and losing. The change was, in my view, both smart and well executed. It appears to have given the company just enough breathing room to push forward with product development, without sacrificing the core ideals upon which Lindows was founded.

The second development was the collapse of the partnership between LindowsOS and the CodeWeavers development team. As you may know, CodeWeavers has since released Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin, products that leverage the code of the Wine project to allow users to run Windows apps in Linux. The boldest objective of Lindows skated away with the departure of the CodeWeavers team. With that change came the need to once again refocus the objectives of both the company and its remaining developers. The ability to run Windows apps in Linux was no longer feasible.

So, we arrive squarely at the state of LindowsOS today. Rather than being a Linux system capable of running Windows apps, LindowsOS is touted as easy to install, easy to use and easy to upgrade. Even if it's by nothing more than sheer determination and vigilant attention to a changing market, the company has survived to release version 3.0 of its OS. It's managed to go where few other Linux distributors have gone before in the form of partnerships with hardware vendors - onto the shelves of Wal-Mart. Prior to LindowsOS, you might be able to find a copy or two of Mandrake or SuSE on your local Wal-Mart's shelves, but never a full-blown, fully installed Linux-equipped box. Keep that Wal-Mart connection in mind. It'll be important as we dive into the OS itself in the next few days.

The Click 'n' Run Warehouse has become the distro's primary selling point. It's a system by which users can open a custom application, entering a virtual software warehouse with shelves and aisles and showrooms. Click on a new application and run the installer. You've already seen the bricks for this virtual warehouse. That foundation, as well, plays a central role in the current state of LindowsOS.

That's the official background, something I always find helpful in understanding the philosophy of a distro vendor. If you've followed Penguin Shell for long, you know that there's also a bit of personal background. Michael Robertson took great exception to the first editorial piece I published on Lindows. In fairness, I should make two points.

The first is that Mr. Robertson was in the deposition phase of the Microsoft litigation when that first piece was published, draining away countless hours answering questions that, when they didn't seem pointless, seemed overtly hostile and predatory. It's an element of litigation that can leave one particularly sensitive to criticism. Often, the response to that criticism is much harsher in delivery than intent.

The second point is that you've only heard half the story - my half. While I offered Mr. Robertson a full Penguin News section to rebut my opinions, he declined, requesting that none of his personal response be published. I respected that and, quite honestly, couldn't have published much of it in good conscience anyway. In the intervening months, he's backed out of the limelight just enough to place the company's focus back on product development and critical partnerships. He's also shown an amazing ability to craft his company's mission in a way that's made the best of several bad situations. I can clearly recognize the dedication of a revolutionary. Though it probably means little to him, I do respect the tenacity to hold fast to a vision. Vision alone isn't enough, but it'll sure take you further than those without it. LindowsOS is firsthand evidence of that truth.

As for the product itself, the real review starts tomorrow.

Have a great Wednesday.

                 
Tony Steidler-Dennison       

GnomeTWEAK

INSTALL Files

Today's GnomeTWEAK is less a tweak than a good installation practice. It's one I used to disregard altogether until, after bruising my forehead on the proverbial install brick wall, I learned its value firsthand. Though most app installs in Linux go pretty easily, it's never the easy ones you remember. The tough ones hold the potential to raise the level of frustration cumulatively until you just give up on Linux altogether. Been there once or twice myself.

rpm files, as you know, are self-contained programs with installation routines all wrapped up in a nice little bundle. Today's GnomeTWEAK really doesn't apply to RPMs. As nice as RPMs can be to install, they're not available for every app you'd like to have on your machine. Even if you're a die-hard rpm user, sometimes you just have to knuckle down, compiling and installing a program from source. We've talked about this process in previous Penguin Shell issues and, I imagine, we'll probably cover it again in depth. Today I just want to point out the value of INSTALL files contained in a .tar.gz app install, rather than rehashing the whole install process.

As you know, .tar.gz files are tarred (all stuck together) and mildly compressed. They need to be uncompressed and untarred into their respective individual files before they can be compiled and installed.

    cd /usr/local/src
    tar zxvf /home/tony/downloads/example.tar.gz

This accomplishes all those preliminary tasks in two steps, leaving a directory in /usr/local/src from which I'll compile and install the app.

There's a critical but often overlooked step before running the configure script that can save much time and grief in the install process. Read the INSTALL file. Period. Any programmer worth their salt will include one with the .tar.gz package and for good reason. These files often contain information about dependencies and available install options. If, for example, your new app requires a specific set of libraries that aren't all that common, you'll probably discover that valuable piece of information in the INSTALL file. In other words, you'll have the opportunity to find, download and install the libraries before your app install fails.

The INSTALL files also often contain information on where the resulting binaries will be installed and instructions for customizing the install to suit your system or your tastes. For example, you might be able to configure the app to install in the /opt/example directory by running configure with that option:

    ./configure prefix=/opt/example

Similarly, you can configure the install to find necessary libraries or other files in a non-standard location. The INSTALL files will also often provide a summary of some of the runtime options for the program.

If years of experience installing apps from .tar.gz files has shown me nothing else, it's proven the value of reading the INSTALL files before beginning the configure and install process. They're not literary masterpieces, by any means, but they can provide the perfect remedy for install headaches - preparatory information that will make for a flawless installation.

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GnomeCORE

Interested in Satellite TV? Get 1 month free, plus all of the equipment you need for up to 4 TVs! Click here for details< /a>.

I've got a quick core tip for you today. It's something we've covered in a much longer fashion as it relates to other issues on your system. However, we've never taken the quick approach or talked about this core function directly.

As you know, your Linux system starts several services at boot. These may include network, printing, cron, sendmail, ssh, ftp ... quite a few. Some of these services are really listeners, listening for requests on specific ports. When a request is received the service passes it on to the proper program to handle the request. These services can make your Linux life a lot easier, but they can also pose a serious risk to the integrity of your system. Any open port can present a risk, so it's always a good idea to pare down your running services to the bare minimum.

Most of the service initialization scripts are called from either the /etc/rc.d/inti.d or /etc/rc.d directories. Notice I said scripts. As noted yesterday, much of the initialization of your system is done with a series of scripts. The services scripts run the full range of complexity from very simple to very involved.

Another feature of these scripts is that they can be stopped and started as needed, using the start | stop | restart commands. That's start or stop or restart. In fact, this can be done in one of two ways. First, you can dive straight into the directory and execute the command:

    /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart

Or, you can call another script, service to, in effect, handle the directory diving.

    /sbin/service network restart

This command can be further shortened, as well. For scripts in the /sbin directory that I use with some regularity, I generally create a symlink in the PATH.

    ln -s /sbin/service /usr/bin/service

This allows me to issue the command as:

    service network restart

As always, there's more than one way to accomplish a task in Linux. As is the case with many other functions, there's often a direct way to accomplish the task and a somewhat abstracted way. In the case of starting, stopping or restarting services, the service script is both a bit of an abstraction and a shorter way to accomplish the same task.

This script may not be available in all distributions. Check your local listings for availability.

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GnomeFILE

MailScanner 4.10-1

http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/

"MailScanner is an Email virus scanner, vulnerability protector, and spam tagger. It supports the Sendmail and Exim MTAs, and the Sophos, McAfee, F-Prot, F-Secure, CommandAV, InoculateIT, Inoculan 4.x, Kaspersky, Nod32, AntiVir, RAV, Panda, and Clam anti-virus scanners. It supports SpamAssassin for highly successful spam identification. It is specifically designed to handle Denial Of Service attacks. It is very easy to install, and requires no changes at all to your sendmail.cf file. It is designed to be lightweight, and won't grind your mail system to a halt with its load. It can be integrated into any email system, regardless of the software in use."

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GnomeVOICE

Using Lindows
Scribbled by Lane Lester

"Tattoos! Boy, I never know what I'm going to get from you... and that's part of the attraction of your newsletter.

"I'm looking forward to your review of LindowsOS. I am not a Linux expert, just a user who doesn't want to use Microsoft products. Over the last few years I made several attempts to move to Linux, but always got discouraged by compile problems and failed dependencies. Finally I was able to use Mandrake with good success for two reasons: 1. I stopped installing anything that didn't come in an .rpm 2. I got VMware (and later, Win4Lin) that allowed me to run the few Winapps for which there is no satisfactory Linux option.

"Then I learned about LindowsOS, and I am mostly very pleased with the switch. My pleasure is twofold, because I am having a more satisfactory experience with Linux, and it is exciting to be involved with a product specifically designed to make the migration from Windows less painful.

"Lindows has switched their strategy from trying to run Window apps to providing the Click-N-Run Warehouse. If LindowsOS succeeds, it will be largely due to the convenience and power of the Click-N-Run concept.

"Finally, thanks for spelling out in detail how to use XMMS for online music."

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GnomeCLICK

KernelNewbies.org

http://www.kernelnewbies.org/

KernelNewbies.org is the homepage of the IRC channel #kernelnewbies. Here's what the maintainers have to say about the page and the channel:

#kernelnewbies is an IRC network dedicated to the "newbie" kernel hacker. The audience mostly consists of people who are learning about the kernel, working on kernel projects or professional kernel hackers that want to help less seasoned kernel people.

The channel is mostly meant for people programming the kernel. People wanting to document kernel internal functions and CS/EE students wanting to learn about the kernel internals are, of course, also welcome. Most denizens of the channel don't mind a bit of generic OS or hardware discussion either, feel free to hang around and participate in any nice discussion that comes along...

However, discussions totally unrelated to the kernel should not by held in this channel; the #offtopic channel is the right place for that.

If you're interested in learning the process of kernel hacking, KernelNewbies.org and #kernelnewbies are a great place to start.

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