The Secrets of Linux: First Steps

A new book and some Slashdot e-mail makes it clear why people like me have to learn how to use Linux and help spread its message beyond the Rarefied Geek Enclave. And also just what a nightmare that's going to be.

Palo Alto, California -- Leaving the Museum of Computer History at Moffatt's Field south of San Francisco, (where I'd stared slack-jawed at the 10-foot tall "Johnniac" computer built decades ago by the Rand Coporation), I headed for Fry's, one of a chain of hi-tech marts and geek Disneylands deep in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The store was a vast tech repository, stuffed with motherboards, hard drives, computer cases, modems and phone hookups, chips, monitors, new software, old software bins, cables and almost anything else any geek might want - including soda, wireless phones, CD's and junk food. A matronly looking older woman in a flowered dress was pushing a shopping cart behind me loading up the components for a custom-built PC. She had a case, motherboard and hard drive and was heading for memory chip aisle.

"It's my third," she smiled sweetly. "Better to make 'em yourself, hon. That way, you buy what you want and need, not what they sell. A truly "personal computer," she said, winking. "I followed her for an aisle or two. A living demonstration of digital empowerment.

There were long rows of manuals, guides and handbooks. Browsing the Linux shelves, I came across a book called "Linux Secrets," written by Naba Barkakati. It wasn't exactly Tom Wolfe, but it called to me. Nobody is more in need of keys to unlock Linux's secrets. I bought "Linux for Dummies," which called to me even more.

***

The thing is, I've got to start using Linux. I have a small army of Slashdotters offering tech support, and a stack of books and manuals. But I have to know more.

My personal rule of technology is that conceptual comprehension has to come before practical application. If you picture what you're doing, you have a better shot of actually doing it. I was happy to see that Barkakati, a programmer, and the author of 18 computer books, agrees. Before starting any big job like installing Linux, he writes, "I always find it helpful to visualize the entire sequence of tasks that I must perform." And the first chapter is encouragingly titled "Understanding the Linux Installation Process."

I'm sure he did his best. But Barkakati didn't do much conceptualizing or big-picture chatter. This world is so comfortable for him it's probably not even possible for him to step back to my level. I hadn't gone a paragrah before I was bogged down in 32-bit processing capabilities and multitasking operating systems.

Linux may be the mother of all visions. "Linux Secrets" cost more than $40, and weighs at least two pounds. It could double as a doorstop, or can be dropped on a burglar's head. It makes a dynamite mousepad. Plowing through this book, I found myself visualizing not Linux but fantasizing about buying a battered old PC with Linux already installed.

"Linux Secrets," which includes Slackware Version 3.0, has gotten good reviews from programmers and some readers, is nearly 900 pages long. It's the first book I've ever read where I don't understood more words than I do.

Now I understand why some people here react to me here as if I'm speaking a foreign language. Clearly, I am. If it's hard for some to stomach me and the way I write, there are easier places for me to work, too. But hardly any places more important for me to be.

So one way or the other, I will use Linux. For me, this isn't some remote, conceptual vision.

It's quite personal and very much a matter of self-interest. Each year, the places where people like me can write what they wish dwindles. If they do to the Net what they've done off it, there won't be any places.

And they're coming. "Power Play," is the coverline of Business Week this week over a beaming picture of AOL's Steve Case, "How the AOL-Netscape-Sun Deal Shakes Up the World of E-Business." The new triumvirate, says the magazines, signifies nothing less than "A new cyber order." If the author of the Halloween Document isn't happy at Microsoft, he now has another place to go.

Trusting government or corporations or journalism or politicians to protect freedom doesn't fly anymore, not for me. As far as I'm concerned, OSS is the Alamo, and I mean to go down like Davy. I might not ever like Linux, or even fully grasp it, but learning to use it is no longer a debatable notion.

But a few pages into "Linux Secrets," I understood just how much of a brawl this will be. The people who told me it was simple probably believe it, but they will go to Computer Hell. On page 184, already stunned and insensate after hundreds of incomprehensible terms, commands and apps like the VT102 emulation and xterm application sections, I came across the section on Shell programs. "If you are not a programmer, you may feel apprehensive about programming. But shell programming can be as simple as storing a few commands in a file. In fact, you can have a useful shell program that has a single command."

***

I am not a programmer, and am terrified at the very idea of programming, Shell or otherwise. "Linux Secrets" uses icons to call attention to important information. Secrets are indicated by padlocks, as in when to type in #1/usr/bin/perl after the script file name. "Perl has many features of C," confines Barkakati," and as you may be aware, most books on C start with an example program that displays "Hello, World!" on your terminal. I paused for a long time on the Tektronix 4014 emulation feature.

"Linux Secrets" has an astonishing amount of information and detail in it. The book takes care to go step-by-step and the chapter on how the World Wide Web actually works is ground-breakingly clear.

***

At the heart of the Open Source, or free software movements, is the idea that computers can give the people using them more power over their lives, more access to information, more freedom to speak, greater understanding of the tools that bring them that information.

This is an enormous idea. As much as some geeks hate hearing about history, it's almost impossible to see Linux as a brand new idea. It isn't. It's a powerful revitalization of one of the greatest old ones - individuals have rights, not just Kings, Queens and Corporations, and that rights need protection.

The original expression of this idea swept through much of the world like wildfire, and brought down some of the most repressive and entrenched institutions on the planet.

All powerful movements need symbols and metaphors by which they can be defined. Linux is an apt metaphor for the forces struggling to shape and define the Internet, the world's freest, and increasingly, most powerful medium.

"People criticize computers, quite rightly, as being built by geeks for geeks," e-mails Karl Fast, a Slashdot regular, and one of my smart , literate and generous tech support volunteers and advisers. "Linux is the pinnacle of this. But these geeks also believe in the power of computing, and that when used properly it can be empowering, enlightening, and emancipating. Linux is slowly evolving from a pure technology movement into a world changing movement. Applications like the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, an OSS project to create an Adope Photoshop clone for UNIX workstations) are proof of this. More and more documentation is being written for the average user. To truly go mainstream we need to see Linux developers understand that people don't want to process words, they want to write; they don't want to create a ppp link, they want to surf the web." What he said. And even Karl may not quite grasp how hard it will be to articulate these principles to masses of alienated and confused non-Linux advocates. The people who make, sell, market and service computers will stand among the most arrogant and inhuman in the history of capitalism. The fear, confusion, callousness, cost, time and grief spawned by this industry is almost unprecedented in the history of business.

Techno-savvy geeks can fend for themselves. But almost anyone who's ever come near a computer has been abused and has horror stories to tell - missing or mixed-up cables, corrupted software, commands that don't work, programs that don't run, drives and systems too weak to handle the things put on them, built-in obsolescence, horrendous and inadequate service.

Almost alone in the business world, computer companies like Apple and Microsoft now routinely charge extra for "incident" responses --timely technical support that ought not to be necessary but can be bought, while hapless customers who simply paid hard-earned dollars for equipment are put on hold to wait for hours. This is the computer industry's equivalent of old-fashioned, mob-like extortion - to get help to use what we make and you buy, pay extra or drown. It's no better than protection money, worse, really, because the people who make and market computes see themselves as something other than goons.

The general public - especially the non techno-minded - stand to gain the most from the OSS movement, yet only a tiny fraction of Americans even know that it exists.

Increasingly policitized geeks are, in effect, working frantically and collectively to build a nation within a nation, a rapidly expanding free zone within the vast network of computers and systems people call the Net, and its subset, the World Wide Web. But are they growing fast enough? Yahoo! Internet Life estimates that there are 84,800,000 Net users and 70,900,000 Web users in America alone. How many use Linux, which offers the potential for a space where, potentially at least, indviduals can control their own information machinery for the first time, and not live at the mercy of others.

How is it that this extraordinary - and yes Karl, potentially world altering movement - is hardly known beyond the six or seven million people who participate in it around the world?

Because the Linux culture is, almost by necessity, ingrown and inward. It doesn't face the world beyond or think much about spreading its message. It has no central or cohesive voice. It is grumpy and idiosyncratic, hostile to newcomers even as it demands they instantly acquire the complex skills necessary to be here. It is sometimes xenophobic. It underestimates its own complexity, is obsessed with technics, and suspicious of language, history, culture and language apart from that which is written and produced here.

***

The curious thing about the small but vocal number of people who tried so hard to drive me off this site in the last few weeks is their short-sightedness. It's clear, to me at least, that we badly need each other, something Karl and many other people here grasped from the first.

Without them, me and people like me can't be sure of a free place to work and write. Without people like me, it's hard for them to communicate the significance of what they're doing to the world beyond. So we're joined together at the hip.

Many here have always gotten this.

"Please don't listen to the shitheads," e-mailed Dan during the first round of flame wars. "I am happy to see you here. You don't have to know as much as we do to be one of us. You can do things I can't do, and I can do things you can't do. Nothing wrong with that. Learn as much as you can and go out there and explain to them what we're doing and why it means more than software and code."

I don't care much for the geeks who demand that people like me learn Linux in order to win their approval. But I do hear the powerful message of the people here who have taught me that what's really at stake isn't technology know-how for it's own sake, but freedom in the most literal sense. In fact, Karl's notion would make a great motto for OSS, something to go software,books, even e-mail: Empowerment, Enlightenment, Emancipation. The woman in Fry's got it years ago, long before I did.

As for me, I have lots of reading to do. If I survive "Linux Secrets," it's onto "Linux for Dummies," perhaps the place I should have started first. -- [e-mail]