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TACL - IT
Division
Migration
- Windows To Linux
The
unthinkable is starting to happen in the
computer world. A PC operating system created
by unpaid programmers is catching on as an
alternative to Microsoft Windows. The
operating system is Linux, created in 1991 by
Finnish college student Linus Torvalds and
fellow programmers on the Internet. Linux has
had a cult following worldwide for eight
years, but it didn’t catch on with the
public because it was hard to set up and
difficult to use.
But
the rough edges in Linux have been smoothed
over, and the latest versions are much easier
to install and use. You can even get a
kinda-sorta plug-and-play version of Linux
that installs on a Windows PC and gives you a
choice at each bootup of Windows or Linux.
That
any operating system could emerge as a
challenger to Windows is amazing enough.
Nearly every new PC comes with Microsoft
Windows, and most new programs are written
just for Windows PCs. All previous competitors
to Windows – even the OS/2 operating system
from industry giant IBM -- have fallen into
obscurity over the last decade.
But this time might be different. Linux has
many technical advantages over Windows, but
its main advantage might be simply that no one
owns it. Because Torvalds wanted to share his
program with the world, he and others who work
on Linux have been giving the operating system
away. Most of the thousands of software
programs that take
advantage
of Linux are free, to use.
This
puts Microsoft at a big disadvantage. It
can’t absorb the "Linux Corp."
because there is no such thing, and it can’t
buy the rights to Linux because Linux is not
for sale.
At present, even with an estimated seven to 20
million users worldwide, Linux is not a threat
to Microsoft in the area marketing experts
call "the desktop" – PCs that are
used in homes and small offices. But it is
already outselling Windows NT, Microsoft’s
server version of Windows, in some parts of
the world, and is used to run about a third of
all the server computers on the Internet.
(Microsoft’s Windows NT is far behind.) At
present, Linux is mostly a replacement
operating system and has to be installed by
users, but it’s also available preinstalled
on PCs from Dell and other manufacturers.
One
new version of Linux, from Caldera , installs
itself the same way Windows does, using
plug-and-play methods. With Caldera’s Linux,
you can even install both Linux and Windows on
the same computer and choose one or the other
each time you boot up.
Versions
of Linux aimed at consumers have graphical
user interfaces – GUIs – that resemble the
look of Windows and the Mac. The most popular
interface is the K Desktop Environment, or KDE.
It’s surprisingly modern and flexible,
taking on the best features of Windows and
Macs and adding many of its own.
Linux
differs from Windows 95 and 98 in many ways.
Here are five important differences:
·
Linux is much more stable. Even if a
program running on a Linux PC crashes, all
other programs running on the computer usually
keep going as if nothing happened. This makes
Linux ideal as a server (a computer that sends
files to other computers on a network or the
Internet).
·
Installing software does not mess up
vital system files in Linux the way it often
does in Windows.
·
Linux handles memory very well. Windows
can run out of memory even if the PC has
hundreds of megabytes of RAM because Microsoft
never fixed an old problem with the way
Windows works. And Linux needs only one-third
to one-half the memory Windows requires.
· There is no DOS or Windows code in
Linux. It was created from scratch to match
the capabilities of modern PCs and has no
relationship with any of Microsoft’s
programs. As a result, Linux runs faster than
Windows, with less operating-system overhead.
· Linux programs are much different from
Windows programs, so Linux PCs cannot run
Windows programs and vice versa. (Windows
emulators are being worked on for Linux, but
they’re still buggy and slow.) This is a big
disadvantage to Linux.
Linux has
hadLinux
backers point out that Linux is the first
non-DOS and non-Microsoft operating system for
PCs since the early 1980s. As such, Linux
offers a fascinating look at how PCs can work
without the burden of Microsoft’s buggy
code. PC users and PC bashers alike may have
made the wrong assumptions – that problems
with PCs come from the way the hardware is
designed. Linux is showing us that ordinary
PCs can work extremely well if they have the
right operating system
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