15. OS SHOCK
Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous country and
visit some other part of the world typically go through several stages
of culture shock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative
engagement with the new country's manners, cuisine, public transit systems
and toilets, leading to a brief period of fatuous confidence that they
are instant experts on the new country. As the visit wears on, homesickness
begins to set in, and the traveler begins to appreciate, for the first
time, how much he or she took for granted at home. At the same time it
begins to seem obvious that many of one's own cultures and traditions are
essentially arbitrary, and could have been different; driving on the right
side of the road, for example. When the traveler returns home and takes
stock of the experience, he or she may have learned a good deal more about
America than about the country they went to visit.
For the same reasons, Linux is worth trying. It is a strange country indeed, but you don't have to live there; a brief sojourn suffices to give some flavor of the place and--more importantly--to lay bare everything that is taken for granted, and all that could have been done differently, under Windows or MacOS.
You can't try it unless you install it. With any other OS, installing it would be a straightforward transaction: in exchange for money, some company would give you a CD-ROM, and you would be on your way. But a lot is subsumed in that kind of transaction, and has to be gone through and picked apart.
We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America. If you go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi somewhere, you become a part of the taxi driver's life; he refuses to take your money because it would demean your friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps hot tears when you get in some other guy's taxi. You end up meeting his kids at some point, and have to devote all sort of ingenuity to finding some way to compensate him without insulting his honor. It is exhausting. Sometimes you just want a simple Manhattan-style taxi ride.
But in order to have an American-style setup, where you can just go out and hail a taxi and be on your way, there must exist a whole hidden apparatus of medallions, inspectors, commissions, and so forth--which is fine as long as taxis are cheap and you can always get one. When the system fails to work in some way, it is mysterious and infuriating and turns otherwise reasonable people into conspiracy theorists. But when the Egyptian system breaks down, it breaks down transparently. You can't get a taxi, but your driver's nephew will show up, on foot, to explain the problem and apologize.
Microsoft and Apple do things the Manhattan way, with vast complexity hidden behind a wall of interface. Linux does things the Egypt way, with vast complexity strewn about all over the landscape. If you've just flown in from Manhattan, your first impulse will be to throw up your hands and say "For crying out loud! Will you people get a grip on yourselves!?" But this does not make friends in Linux-land any better than it would in Egypt.
You can suck Linux right out of the air, as it were, by downloading the right files and putting them in the right places, but there probably are not more than a few hundred people in the world who could create a functioning Linux system in that way. What you really need is a distribution of Linux, which means a prepackaged set of files. But distributions are a separate thing from Linux per se.
Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes, but a self-organizing Net subculture. The end result of its collective lucubrations is a vast body of source code, almost all written in C (the dominant computer programming language). "Source code" just means a computer program as typed in and edited by some hacker. If it's in C, the file name will probably have .c or .cpp on the end of it, depending on which dialect was used; if it's in some other language it will have some other suffix. Frequently these sorts of files can be found in a directory with the name /src which is the hacker's Hebraic abbreviation of "source."
Source files are useless to your computer, and of little interest to most users, but they are of gigantic cultural and political significance, because Microsoft and Apple keep them secret while Linux makes them public. They are the family jewels. They are the sort of thing that in Hollywood thrillers is used as a McGuffin: the plutonium bomb core, the top-secret blueprints, the suitcase of bearer bonds, the reel of microfilm. If the source files for Windows or MacOS were made public on the Net, then those OSes would become free, like Linux--only not as good, because no one would be around to fix bugs and answer questions. Linux is "open source" software meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.
Your computer doesn't want source code any more than you do; it wants object code. Object code files typically have the suffix .o and are unreadable all but a few, highly strange humans, because they consist of ones and zeroes. Accordingly, this sort of file commonly shows up in a directory with the name /bin, for "binary."
Source files are simply ASCII text files. ASCII denotes a particular way of encoding letters into bit patterns. In an ASCII file, each character has eight bits all to itself. This creates a potential "alphabet" of 256 distinct characters, in that eight binary digits can form that many unique patterns. In practice, of course, we tend to limit ourselves to the familiar letters and digits. The bit-patterns used to represent those letters and digits are the same ones that were physically punched into the paper tape by my high school teletype, which in turn were the same one used by the telegraph industry for decades previously. ASCII text files, in other words, are telegrams, and as such they have no typographical frills. But for the same reason they are eternal, because the code never changes, and universal, because every text editing and word processing software ever written knows about this code.
Therefore just about any software can be used to create, edit, and read source code files. Object code files, then, are created from these source files by a piece of software called a compiler, and forged into a working application by another piece of software called a linker.
The triad of editor, compiler, and linker, taken together, form the core of a software development system. Now, it is possible to spend a lot of money on shrink-wrapped development systems with lovely graphical user interfaces and various ergonomic enhancements. In some cases it might even be a good and reasonable way to spend money. But on this side of the road, as it were, the very best software is usually the free stuff. Editor, compiler and linker are to hackers what ponies, stirrups, and archery sets were to the Mongols. Hackers live in the saddle, and hack on their own tools even while they are using them to create new applications. It is quite inconceivable that superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered.
In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.
I could say a lot about emacs and TeX, but right now I am trying to tell a story about how to actually install Linux on your machine. The hard-core survivalist approach would be to download an editor like emacs, and the GNU Tools--the compiler and linker--which are polished and excellent to the same degree as emacs. Equipped with these, one would be able to start downloading ASCII source code files (/src) and compiling them into binary object code files (/bin) that would run on the machine. But in order to even arrive at this point--to get emacs running, for example--you have to have Linux actually up and running on your machine. And even a minimal Linux operating system requires thousands of binary files all acting in concert, and arranged and linked together just so.
Several entities have therefore taken it upon themselves to create "distributions" of Linux. If I may extend the Egypt analogy slightly, these entities are a bit like tour guides who meet you at the airport, who speak your language, and who help guide you through the initial culture shock. If you are an Egyptian, of course, you see it the other way; tour guides exist to keep brutish outlanders from traipsing through your mosques and asking you the same questions over and over and over again.
Some of these tour guides are commercial organizations, such as Red Hat Software, which makes a Linux distribution called Red Hat that has a relatively commercial sheen to it. In most cases you put a Red Hat CD-ROM into your PC and reboot and it handles the rest. Just as a tour guide in Egypt will expect some sort of compensation for his services, commercial distributions need to be paid for. In most cases they cost almost nothing and are well worth it.
I use a distribution called Debian (the word is a contraction of "Deborah" and "Ian") which is non-commercial. It is organized (or perhaps I should say "it has organized itself") along the same lines as Linux in general, which is to say that it consists of volunteers who collaborate over the Net, each responsible for looking after a different chunk of the system. These people have broken Linux down into a number of packages, which are compressed files that can be downloaded to an already functioning Debian Linux system, then opened up and unpacked using a free installer application. Of course, as such, Debian has no commercial arm--no distribution mechanism. You can download all Debian packages over the Net, but most people will want to have them on a CD-ROM. Several different companies have taken it upon themselves to decoct all of the current Debian packages onto CD-ROMs and then sell them. I buy mine from Linux Systems Labs. The cost for a three-disc set, containing Debian in its entirety, is less than three dollars. But (and this is an important distinction) not a single penny of that three dollars is going to any of the coders who created Linux, nor to the Debian packagers. It goes to Linux Systems Labs and it pays, not for the software, or the packages, but for the cost of stamping out the CD-ROMs.
Every Linux distribution embodies some more or less clever hack for circumventing the normal boot process and causing your computer, when it is turned on, to organize itself, not as a PC running Windows, but as a "host" running Unix. This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless. When a PC boots up, it goes through a little self-test routine, taking an inventory of available disks and memory, and then begins looking around for a disk to boot up from. In any normal Windows computer that disk will be a hard drive. But if you have your system configured right, it will look first for a floppy or CD-ROM disk, and boot from that if one is available.
Linux exploits this chink in the defenses. Your computer notices a bootable disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive, loads in some object code from that disk, and blindly begins to execute it. But this is not Microsoft or Apple code, this is Linux code, and so at this point your computer begins to behave very differently from what you are accustomed to. Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags.
Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: klogd 1.3-3, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Loaded 3535 symbols from /System.map. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Symbols match kernel version 2.0.30. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: No module symbols loaded. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Intel MultiProcessor Specification v1.4 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Virtual Wire compatibility mode. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: OEM ID: INTEL Product ID: 440FX APIC at: 0xFEE00000 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #0 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processor #1 Pentium(tm) Pro APIC version 17 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: I/O APIC #2 Version 17 at 0xFEC00000. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Processors: 2 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: 16 point font, 400 scans Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Console: colour VGA+ 80x25, 1 virtual console (max 63) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory structure at 0x000fdb70 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : BIOS32 Service Directory entry at 0xfdb80 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: pcibios_init : PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdba1 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Probing PCI hardware. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Warning : Unknown PCI device (10b7:9001). Please read include/linux/pci.h Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Memory: 64268k/66556k available (700k kernel code, 384k reserved, 1204k data) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society NET3.035 for Linux 2.0 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: NET3: Unix domain sockets 0.13 for Linux NET3.035. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Swansea University Computer Society TCP/IP for NET3.034 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking 386/387 coupling... Ok, fpu using exception 16 error reporting. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Checking 'hlt' instruction... Ok. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Linux version 2.0.30 (root@theRev) (gcc version 2.7.2.1) #15 Fri Mar 27 16:37:24 PST 1998 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Booting processor 1 stack 00002000: Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 179.40 BogoMIPS Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Total of 2 processors activated (358.81 BogoMIPS). Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Serial driver version 4.13 with no serial options enabled Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: lp1 at 0x0378, (polling) Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: PS/2 auxiliary pointing device detected -- driver installed. Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: Real Time Clock Driver v1.07 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: loop: registered device at major 7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hda: Conner Peripherals 1275MB - CFS1275A, 1219MB w/64kB Cache, LBA, CHS=619/64/63 Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdb: Maxtor 84320A5, 4119MB w/256kB Cache, LBA, CHS=8928/15/63, DMA Dec 14 15:04:15 theRev kernel: hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: md driver 0.35 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP: version 2.2.0 (dynamic channel allocation) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: TCP compression code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP Dynamic channel allocation code copyright 1995 Caldera, Inc. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: PPP line discipline registered. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: SLIP: version 0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic channels, max=256). Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps/Combo at 0xef00, 00:60:08:a4:3c:db, IRQ 10 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: 8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10base2 interface. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.49 1/2/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Partition check: Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdb: hdb1 hdb2 Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: Adding Swap: 16124k swap-space (priority -1) Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: EXT2-fs warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: hdc: media changed Dec 15 11:58:06 theRev kernel: ISO9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A Dec 15 11:58:07 theRev syslogd 1.3-3#17: restart. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Unable to open options file /etc/diald/diald.options: No such file or directory Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: No device specified. You must have at least one device! Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define a connector script (option 'connect'). Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define the remote ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: You must define the local ip address. Dec 15 11:58:09 theRev diald[87]: Terminating due to damaged reconfigure.
The only parts of this that are readable, for normal people, are the error messages and warnings. And yet it's noteworthy that Linux doesn't stop, or crash, when it encounters an error; it spits out a pithy complaint, gives up on whatever processes were damaged, and keeps on rolling. This was decidedly not true of the early versions of Apple and Microsoft OSes, for the simple reason that an OS that is not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time cannot possibly recover from errors. Looking for, and dealing with, errors requires a separate process running in parallel with the one that has erred. A kind of superego, if you will, that keeps an eye on all of the others, and jumps in when one goes astray. Now that MacOS and Windows can do more than one thing at a time they are much better at dealing with errors than they used to be, but they are not even close to Linux or other Unices in this respect; and their greater complexity has made them vulnerable to new types of errors.
