Linux Lab

By Duane Gustavus, UNIX Research Analyst

This article provides a user-level introduction to the Linux systems now being introduced in some UNT General Access computer labs. The goal of this project is to provide the UNT community with access to this increasingly popular Open Source software environment.

Introduction

By this time, most people who use computer systems frequently have at least heard of UNIX, though they may have heard it as Linux or BSD. Few of these nice folks have been offered enough useful information to be able to understand what UNIX is or why they might care, and indeed most of them manage to lead full, satisfying lives anyway. UNIX is not a religion (though it certainly has zealous supporters), nor a panacea for the computing ills of the world; it is a mature, powerful computing environment which might be of considerable interest if you are a "power user" or even if you are just fascinated by information technology.

The majority of computer users, especially if you started in the last five years or so, will probably compare UNIX to Microsoft WinXX. While this comparison provides some interesting contrasts, it would be a mistake to carry it too far since Microsoft has been targeted for business use (spreadsheets and word processors) while UNIX was oriented more to technical applications (technical writing, operating system and language design). By this time, of course, there is considerable overlap, but this fundamental orientation can still be discerned. UNIX too was initially offered as a commercial product supporting expensive (in personal computer terms) workstation hardware, and was expensive software. The early versions I remember for PC hardware sold in the one-to-two thousand dollar price range -- easily an order of magnitude more than Microsoft. My view of how and why UNIX became the basis for the most common free(1) computing environment while Microsoft replaced IBM as the most monopolistic business in the industry was presented in an earlier Benchmarks Online article, "The UNIX Question."

Linux, though more appropriately called GNU/Linux, has become particularly wide-spread, finding enthusiastic acceptance in an international scope. The product of literally thousands of people working in various parts of the world, Linux has become the "poster child" of the free software movement, complete with it's own subculture(2) and mascot. Viewed as a social phenomenon, the free software movement stands practically alone in the fight to preserve some public land in cyberspace from the depredation of corporate raiders staking claims to every imaginable intellectual property. This battle for freedom of expression and communication may have repercussions for information technology felt for many years.

In an attempt to offer those of the UNT community interested in this environment the opportunity to acquaint themselves with Linux, a project named "Linux Lab" was started earlier this year. Despite the name, the Linux Lab idea is not a general access lab full of Linux systems, but rather a network distributed implementation allowing current general access labs to add one or a number of Linux systems to their existing compliment of services. The goal is to provide access to a representative Linux installation which can be replicated by individuals on their own computers should they so desire.

What is Linux Lab?

Imagine a computing environment that is highly customizable; what it looks like, how it works, what it does for you is a matter of personal taste and initiative. Regardless of which Linux Lab system in which general access lab you login to, your personalized interface is presented, and your individual disk storage place is available. You may explore the Internet, write and print documents, generate and process images, do statistical analysis, communicate with people in other parts of the world and experience a different perspective on what a computing environment can be. When you logout and leave the lab, the next person to login to the same hardware may well get an entirely different interface and will have their private disk storage made available instead of yours.

This is the goal of the Linux Lab project which, while still in its infancy in terms of the number of installations, is nonetheless on its way. After you login, you will be presented with a GUI (graphic user interface) which has a reasonably predictable behavior (i.e. click on an icon to launch a program, click on an item to select it for processing, double-click on an item to execute its associated application).

What applications are available?

Current Linux Lab systems have quite a few applications which could be of value in an academic environment. Most will have their own Websites which discuss the application, have pointers to where it can be downloaded, and often links to personal information about the authors. The amount and quality of the documentation you find at these sites will vary widely, and can be used as a first order approximation of how interesting this application is. This is certainly not intended to be an exhaustive list, but will give you an idea of what to expect.

Lyx is a graphical user interface to a document processing language named LaTeX. Don't worry; you don't have to learn to use LaTeX since Lyx does all that for you. There is an active Website at http://www.lyx.org/, and Lyx comes with online tutorials and reference material.

Gimp is an image processing tool which is very powerful. You can read images from most popular formats, apply many processing techniques to them, and save them to disk in a number of formats. All of the images on this Website (and many others!) were made with the gimp. There are LOTS of gimp links from the home Website (http://www.gimp.org/).

Gnome (http://www.gnome.org) is a session manager which offers personal productivity applications like an address book, a calendar, help browsers, clocks, calculators and more. For instance, Gnumeric (http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/) is the Gnome spreadsheet program.

XEmacs (http://www.xemacs.org/) is a variant of the GNU Emacs editor with a more graphic-oriented interface. Emacs is a very powerful text editor oriented towards more technical users, and provides specialized interfaces for programming, reading net news, E-mail and even browsing the Web. If you are looking for a word processor, however, you should try Lyx mentioned above. GNU Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/) is also available on Linux Lab systems for those who prefer it.

Netscape Communicator, a common graphic Web browser, and lynx, the most popular text-based Web browser, are both available.

Additional graphics utilities found on these systems include Electric Eyes for viewing images, GQview which offers quick thumbnails of images in a directory, and utilities like ImageMagick and netpbm.

Numerical computation is represented by Scilab (http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/) while R (http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/) is a system for statistical computation and graphics.

Additional text processing software includes acroread, a free but NOT open source pdf reader from Adobe, wordinspect to query a public dictionary server (http://www.dict.org/) for word definitions, the ghostscript renderer for postscript files, including the ghostview postscript viewer and a full TeX/LaTeX installation to support Lyx.

If you are interested in programming, Linux Lab systems include the egcs-2.91.66 c compiler, perl, python, tcl/tk 8.0 and various editors like emacs, xemacs, vi and even pico.

System utilities include font selectors, color browsers, various terminal emulators and graphic file managers, a strip charter, process monitors and window manager toolkits. If you're a UNIX geek, you will find most of the standard commands and text oriented utilities that are familiar. The default X Windows manager is iceWM using gnome as a session manager, but KDE and WindowMaker are also installed.

Why is everything different?

What will be substantially different about the Linux Lab environment from the one you are probably familiar with will be the applications themselves. You will not find Microsoft applications because these are proprietary, so if you want to write a paper, for example, you would use a program like LyX. Many things about LyX are different from a familiar word processor like Microsoft Word, so you will be tempted to ask why not stick with what is most familiar to the largest number of users? An easy response would be that Microsoft spends large amounts of money on litigation to ensure that other software doesn't model its products too closely, but that misses an important point. Lyx is really just a graphic front-end to the TeX text processing system.

TeX was designed by Donald Knuth in the late 1970's to produce publication quality documentation complete with drivers for typesetting machines. Remarkably for the time, TeX was free, so over the years thousands of volunteers have contributed to its refinement adding macros, style sheets, templates and GUI's like LyX. To support publication all the way through the typesetting phase, Knuth provided METAFONT, a tool for creating fonts, and included the Computer Modern font set. The result of this approach is that papers written with TeX twenty years ago can be processed by a contemporary version today and will look exactly the same as the original -- new versions of software do not have to be incompatible with older versions; it's simply that there is a strong incentive to do so if your business is dependent on selling new software (you may, of course, not join me in my suspicion that this is what gives rise to many new "features").

This does not prove that TeX is the best tool for your writing project, but does show that it has a long history and good reputation as a document generation system. Indeed, several professional journals utilize TeX for their publications(3). My point here is not to slam Microsoft for running a profitable business, but to point out that software development which is not driven by a profit mentality is able to make decisions which may well be sub-optimal for a business, but still preferable from a user perspective.

This example using text processing is a recurring pattern in the free software world; a simple case study in why the unrestricted availability of the source code is important, even if you're not a programmer. Portability is the mantra. Because the source code was freely available, TeX has been ported to many different hardware platforms. Linux ports can currently be found for SGI, Sun, Macs, COMPAQ, Dell, IBM and HP; platforms include PCs, workstations, mainframes, super-computers, laptops and even PDAs. While all applications have not been ported to all platforms, the only constraint to this is the willingness of some programmer or group to do so, not the decision by some corporation that it is commercially viable.

More information

The most current information on the status of Linux Lab systems, including how to get an account, where to find them, and what applications are available, can be found at the Linux Lab Website (http://linuxlab.unt.edu). This site also provides links to other useful Linux Websites, a few screenshots of the default interface and links to papers which describe the implementation of both the client nodes and the Linux Lab server.(4)

Footnotes

1 That's free as in "free speech," not necessarily free as in "free beer."

2 http://slashdot.org/ is the best know advocacy site, though far from the only one.

3 The American Mathematical Society, American Physical Society, Optical Society of America and American Institute for Physics have all defined macro sets for TeX publication.

4 If you read this far, you might be interested in dropping in on Salon's Free Software Project. Salon is "taking a book about the history, ideas and personalities behind the free-software/open-source movement -- a book that Andrew Leonard is in the process of writing -- and posting it, in pieces. . . as it's written." The book is being published to the Free Software Project Website and Salon is "inviting readers -- Linux veterans and newbies alike -- to post their comments, criticisms and reactions. Leonard will in turn respond, and incorporate changes in the text as seems right."

Cartoon about confusing the words Linux and Linus.