Re: ...the Linux saga...

[Jeffery Douglas Waddell <jwaddell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Clay,

Clay Howe wrote:

> The NEWBIE Linux Saga...
>

Cool title, maybe as you flesh it out, you should submit it to the Linux Documentation Project, as a guide to those who will follow the same (or similar) path as you are following now.

> If you don't like long stories, please leave this message, and go on to better things. This is a continuing saga of a newbie who has been enticed to try Linux, and is trying to do it with the least pain...
>
> I've been working with computers for many years, but really have no formal computer training. My first experience was several years ago when I built a Sinclair ZX-80 (and later a ZX-81) and taught myself the computer language - BASIC.
>
> BASIC was a very "logical" language, and quite easy to learn... even for someone like myself who had very little education (dropped out of high school) and had never seen a computer before. The "words" meant something - IF was if, THEN was then, etc...
>
> After a bunch of years doing BASIC on machines from the Sinclair to the CoCo, to the RS Model III - I finally graduated to the ultimate - the Tandy 1000 which worked in the MSDOS world.
>
> Next came the more powerful machines... the SUPER Intel 286's - then 386's, and the unbelievable 486's... This was power... and we now had a super operating system - MSDOS 5.x, and the beginning of the "best of the best" - Windows 286-386... and then Windows 3.1.
>
> I did manage to master all of these OS's - putting up with the bugs and upgrades... then I moved into the world of WINDOWS 95... this was a very friendly place to be, and made computing very enjoyable... no more BASIC stuff, with all of it's (logical, but strange) commands...
>

So you don't do any kind of development on that Windows 95 platform then?!  I have not found it very friendly at all.  In fact it seems pretty hostile to me.

> Now it's 1998... I work almost exclusively within Win95. Then at a computer show, I pick up some literature about Linux, and talk to the guys at the booth. They perk my interest a bit when they claim that Linux is the cure to all of my Win95 problems - although I've had very few problems with Win95.
>

Well, they have not represented Linux well if they only promoted it as a cure to all your Win95 woes.  Linux is wonderful, but it doesn't solve every problem and in some cases creates more than it's worth, but it allows you to do things you may not be accostumed to doing.

> I have a couple extra machines at home that are doing nothing... one is a 486 with a couple fairly large hard drives and quite a bit of RAM, so I decide to give Linux a try.

Great!!!!

> The next step is to try to learn as much about Linux as I can, and find the best way to install it and get it running, so it will actually do somethine useful for me.
>

First thing to do then, is to DECIDE WHAT would be USEFUL to you.  If you don't know what would be useful then you are simply playing (which can be useful in itself), but will probably get frustrated fast, because the RULES are MUCH different from what you are used to.

> ...I'm lucky to have access to several versions of Linux available to me - a friend has let me borrow the CDROMs with RedHat, Linux Pro, Slackware, and Debian versions... By now I have checked out a bunch of the Linux sites on the WEB, and have subscribed to a couple of the Linux newsgroups... The closest Linux user group is 50 miles away, so I decide to do it by myself, with just the info from the WEB, and the CDROM that I have...
>

Well the User's group that I'm President of (Southern Missouri Linux User's Club, hope you KLUG members don't mind me jumping in here, please feel free check out our club as well) is apparently much farther away, but you are welcome to use any of our web resources that are useful to you.  Check out http://www.oznet.com/luc for more information including how to subscribe to our mailinglist's, and or read the mailing list archive's.

> I have dedicated the 486 machine to Linux, with a 540 meg hard drive to be partitioned for only that OS...

OK!

> The first one I try is the Linux Pro. The installation was very easy, with no problems. LILO worked OK - and everything seemed OK, but I was having problems navigating the system (OS) and doing some of the "simple" things - like a DIR A:, or DIR D: (the cdrom) - and yes, I was using the LS command, and what I though was the proper /DEV commands... but still having problems...

Ahhhhh, an old DOS user.  You have a concept to learn here that may be painful, but once you get it I think you discover that it is a nice change.  Part 1)  Unix has 1 logical tree for all storage devices on the system (This would be equivalent to a DOS machine with one huge A: drive and only that A: drive, but there's a little more to it)  Part 2) A device's information (usually a file structure of some type, examples would be ext2, minix, fat32, fat, and vfat) can be placed into the
logical file structure at ANY point in the tree.  You might want to reread part 2, because it is not something you can do in DOS or Windows3.1/95.  The very top of this tree (you might want to visualize it as an inverted tree, if your a visual person) is known as the root and is indicated by the /.  If you do an 'ls -l /' you will see the files and directories in the main root directory.  When what is known as the root filesystem is created, it generally includes all the binary
applications and all the device files needed to have a minimally useful system, and then filesystems are added to the root via an action known as mounting in order to fill this tree out with more useful and fun stuff.  Things such the /home directory or the /usr/X11 directory or even the /usr/local directory are often mounted devices other than the device mounted as root.  You might ask how this could possibly be useful, I'll give you just one example that may not be of use to you but
is of use to those of us involved in multi-user system's.  Let's say I have two hard drive's in my machine.  The first hard drive is a 540 Meg drive and the second hard drive is 200 Meg drive.  I've install the base linux system on the 200 Meg drive (barely big enough, if you put Xwindows on it), but I use the 540 Meg drive as the /home directory (i.e. I create one partition on this 540 Meg drive and I use mke2fs to create a ext2 filesystem on it, then mount that partition as the
/home directory).  Ok things are good, my system runs for awhile and I have say 50 user's using it.  Then one day the power supply on my little computer dies.  But my user's need the machine NOW.  I don't have time to fix or get a replacement for the power supply.  I can simply take the hard drive out, and place it in another unix system (physically) tell that system to mount the partition on this hard drive as /home (of course I may have to un mount the home directory that is already
there, and then there is the matter of your passwords and groups that could cause you a headache if you don't have them backed up where you can get to them) and this other system is now useable exactly as if it were the original system.  I think maybe I've done a poor job of explaining that so that it makes sense.  If you've done it before it makes sense, if you haven't it probably doesn't.  Anybody got a better way of saying this?

> I KILLED all of the hard drives and started again from scratch - this time with Red Hat 5.0... this install was a bit more friendly, and it wasn't too long 'till I had the system running with this installation... It even had an XWin thing that looked a bit like the familiar Win95...
>

It may look familiar but it's NOT the same thing, Xwindows let you do stuff that Win95 doesn't.

> I tried to do a DIR of my my floppy drive - A: - by using the commands shown in the books - CD /dev/fd0 - ls - etc... didn't work! Then tried to do it with the CDROM drive... CD /dev/cdrom... didn't work...!! Studied the books some more, and the files (HOWTO's) that I had downloaded from the WEB, but still could not even read a directory on the floppy drive, or the CDROM drive...
>

The /dev/fd0 is the device FILE that corresponds to your device.  This is used tell the system information about your device and allow attachment to the raw device.  If you want to USE this particular device as part of the FILESYSTEM you must make it (temporarily) part of that tree.  The first thing you will want to do is to check out what you already have in your tree the easiest way to do this is via the mount command.  Simply issue

'mount'

at the shell command prompt and it will indicate what is already mounted (you will probably see something like

/ ext2 /dev/hda1

if you have the first partition of the first IDE drive mounted as root and it's an ext2 filesystem).  The df command can also be usefull in gather information about what is already mounted and how much of the filesystem is already taken up.  Try it and see what it says.

Ok now that you have a little information about your current system, let's add to the tree by mounting a new device.  In order to mount a device, it must be a block device and you must have an empty directory to mount it on (you can actually mount to a directory that is full, but I don't recommend it, and you'll hopefully be prevented from doing that by mount, but don't count on it, the tool write ASSUME you know what your doing, which is not always a good assumption ;)  If you do an
ls -l /dev/fd0 you will find that it is probably a symbolic link to the file /dev/fd0H1440 (assumes that your floppy drive is a high density 1.44 Meg drive).  If you do an ls -l /dev/fd0H1440 it will give you a listing similar to (I'm not at a linux or unix box here at work so forgive the errors)

brw-rw-rw-    1    root    root    /dev/fd0H1440

The b indicates that it is a block device.  Now most systems automatically create an empty directory called /mnt specifically for mounting things on.  There is usually no reason not to use this mount point.  The biggest reason NOT to use this mount point is when you want to make what you are mounting a PERMANENT part of the tree.  There are some easy ways to set that up that I won't go into here.

Ok, so we have a block device and we have a mount point now we need ot mount the block device on the filesystem at the mount point.  Let's try:

'mount /dev/fd0 /mnt'

if this works you should be able to do

'mount'

and it will know show the original

/    ext2    /dev/hda1

plus your newly mounted filesystem

/mnt    msdos    /dev/fd0

(assumes that you mounted an msdos floppy)

The neat thing here is that if you have permission on the raw floppy device you could mount it anywhere you want (say /home/floppy, or /usr/bin/extra.binary.files, or /whatever).  Usually the stock mount command will only let the root (administrator) mount filesystems, there are good reasons for this, but you can use the Automount Daemon and other utilities to give ordinary user's the ability to mount certain devices (usually the cdrom and floppy), but you'll have to configure that in
your /etc/mounttab file.

Anyway once the device is mounted you access it at the point it is mounted in the tree.  I.E. above you would do
'ls -l /mnt' not 'ls -l /dev/fd0', because the latter will show you the same thing it did before, but the /mnt will now contain you entire floppy filesystem.  Yeahhhh!

Of course, if it's just a floppy disk that you want quick access to the mtools applications are much easier to use.  mdir, mcopy, mdel, mattrib, mformat, etc.  I believe you can read about them by doing a man mtools.

> Yes, it did do the MOUNT stuff, but still no DIR (or LS) of either drive...

Did you ls the mount point (the directory which you mounted the device on) or the device itself?  The device itself should not chance, but the empty directory you mounted it on should now be full of stuff (assuming your disk isn't empty ;)

> By now, I'm beginning to realize that Linux - enen though it may do some jobs better and easier - is NOT the OS for a beginner, and will require a LOT of time learning it's command structure... Win95, and it's ease of use, it wasn't...

No it's not, but I can't DO what I want to do with Win95.

> BTW, what is the correct pronounciation of Linux? I went to a computer show and asked the guys at the Linux booth about "LIE-NUX" and they looked at me like I was nuts... after some study, I found that it was supposed to be "LEE-NUX" - but then that didn't seem to be right either... I know that Linux is patterned after UNIX - but is is pronounced "LUU-NIX"??
>

I have an .au file (audio format, which is neat because you can just dump the raw file to the raw audio device and have it play the sound) of Linus Torvalds pronouncing LEE-NOOKS if you would like me to email it to you just ask.  It's actually kind of humorous.

> So, anyway... I still would like to get to know Linux a bit, and actually get it to do something useful for me. I'm 50 miles from the closest user that I know of, so it isn't like poping into a local friends place to learn a few useful things.
>

As I stated above feel free to utilize the web resources available to you.

> Finally - two things that have been bothering me... First, is Linux really useful to a "home user" who only wants to do a few apps - word processing, get on the Internet, etc...

That depends on many things, but my wife finds it very useful.  Without it see can't get or send email conveniently.

> and the most bothersom thing... why do Linux people on the news groups seem to find it more important to point out the minor problems that people are haveing with other OS's, than spending that same time and bandwidth supporting their favorite OS and helping others with their problems??
>

Well In my case the Other OS's problems are NOT minor, they hinder my job performance and generally tend to drive me insane, (not that Linux doesn't also sometimes drive me insane).  But as to the motives of these people I would have to say that in general it's a maturity thing.  In an effort to justify their own choices the find it necessary to slam the choices of others.  The impressive thing about Linux as system is that it gains ground IN SPITE of this behaviour.

> I'd like to hear from anyone who has used Win95,

Yep, everyday at work, (where I'm sending this email from)

> and has then used Linux,

Yep, everyday at home.

> to see what their impressions were as to home use and accessing the net...

Well, how many people do you need to connect to the net?  Do you want to pay $20 a month for each one of them or do you want to pay for one account and use it for all of the people in your house?  Linux is somewhat harder to get going in some respects, but it has so much MORE potential that for me it's worth it.  By the way, a really useful thing to do with one of those extra machines of yours is to set it up as a router for your internet connect.  Firewall your network (even if it's
just one Win95 machine with the router) and help prevent many of the Back Orifice, WinNuke and other nasties lurking on the net for your Win95 machine, as well as increase the throughput to your ISP because your machine that is handling the ppp connection is not also trying to handle EVERYTHING else you are doing.  www.linuxrouter.org has a distribution set up (one 1 floppy) for just this purpose.  I've never had to worry about virus off the net.  The biggest worry I have is that some
spammer will use relaying off my box to send out there spam and I'm generally not connect long enough to the net for them to do that.

> I know that there are lots of Linux users who are kind of forced to it's use by being associated with UNIX systems, and others who have never used Win95 (or 98) that really don't have a useful comparison to present...

I use both systems and I definately prefer the UN*X way of doing things.  Windows takes too much control away from me.

> I still have the 486 systen, and I won't give up easily to Linux's unusual requirements... I'd like to learn how to use it. It seems like someone should write a book for Linux beginners that would say things like... "if you want to see the DIR of your CDROM, do this command..." and then state the command, rather that assume that the user already knows what the command is...
>

Linux for Dummies is probably the book you are referring to.  I think you can order it from amazon.com.  I'm not recommending it as I've not read it, but I have seen it at the local Barnes and Noble.

> I have the Red Hat 5.1 on CDROM coming soon... I could not get it fron the local Linux user group, as they requested that I travel 50 miles, and bring my machine with me to get it installed - at the very inexpensive price of $2... but I found that I could buy the latest version from the Linux Mall for only $1.49 (plus shipping) and it would be delivered to my door... can't beat a deal like that!
>

Yep, if you want to explore different distributions LinuxMall has a 6 pack of different distributions for like $10 bucks plus shipping.  I got SuSE 5.2 and I'm pretty happy with it.  They've done some really neat things with the integration of multiple Xmanagers.

> Back many years ago, I spent many late hours trying to master IF, THEN, ELSE with the Sinclair ZX-80... maybe I can even figure out the Linux command structure...
>

There is NO DOUBT that you can figure it out.  You may wish to get one of those Learn Unix In 21 days type books, because the Concepts are quite different.  You have to realize that the optimization of the system is for large numbers of multiple user's doing multiple and separate things.  All of this is generally done with small utilities that combined with each other to get large jobs done.  (notably exception to this rule is Netscape, which is huge)

> The saga continues - stay tuned for the next installment...
>

ok.

> Bye,
>
> Clay Howe
> clayhowe@net-link.net

  Good luck

Sincerely,

Jeff Waddell
jwaddell@ix.netcom.com

PS. Clay don't panic if you get two copies of this, as I'm sending one directly to you and the other to the KLUG mailing list.