Functional

Coupled with it’s included suite of accompanying open source software a Linux installation is an incredibly capable operating system (OS) for your computer, just like each and every other OS it enables you to mouse around, print out and do all the groovy stuff you *do*, it’s functionality is no different and is just as enabling, you can create documents and spreadsheets for business, check email, surf the net, Facebook, Skype and Twitter to your hearts content, you can process photographs, make movies, listen to music and sync up your iPod…..all via an inherently stable software platform, all without the worry of virus infection, and all free of charge, just download and install it, on top of all that your PC will run faster, guaranteed. Linux will breathe new life into that PC you thought you needed to replace. At the back end (for servers) Linux is again more than capable, due to it’s scalability & stability approaching 90% of the worlds  supercomputers run on Linux as do the vast majority of web servers around the World Wide Web.

“But what about my Windows programs? What if there’s no suitable Open Source alternative? Anyway I’m used to using them, I don’t want to learn anything new……”

Not a problem, Open Office is a free and straight replacement for your present package and will handle all your files quite happily, however if you really do have applications you feel you just can’t leave behind well don’t worry, you don’t have to, all you need is a little WINE.
WINE stands for ‘Wine Is Not and Emulator‘, I’ll explain. An emulation utility runs inside a virtual instance and as such is invariably slow due to the extra processing power required to power both it and the virtual machine, WINE is merely an application port utility which, basically, enables you to run your most popular Windows based programs on Linux, that’s it.

So, how come Microsoft has a 90% hold on the worlds desktop computers? Unrivaled marketing for one, lack of education for another and fear of the unknown in relation to support and perceived fluidity of the open source alternative. But what better indicator of mainstream viability than the fact Dell computers now offer Ubuntu as an optional pre-install on their systems.

Today we occupy an unstable world in apparent financial ruins with blame and greed abounding most headlines, but of course the mass media only ever sensationalise the bad and through the open source collective there’s a huge positive to embrace from a vibrant and solid flip side. Whilst free market capitalism was destroying society the collaborative Open Source community was developing it, let’s just sit back for a minute and truly appreciate the scale of what’s been accomplished here…

Fact – “A 2001 study of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that this distribution contained 30 million source lines of code. Using the Constructive Cost Model, the study estimated that this distribution required about eight thousand man-years of development time. According to the study, if all this software had been developed by conventional proprietary means, it would have cost about 1.08 billion dollars (year 2000 U.S. dollars) to develop in the United States”.

Quite something.

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