Linux has Arrived

The first time I touched Linux was during my graduate school days. In 1997 one of my colleagues, Dr. Venkatesh Raghvan visited us in Tokyo University and we discussed the possibilities of serving maps on Internet using GIS and Relational Databases. He told many good things about the funky operating system called Linux and we decided to give it a try! Venkatesh and I went to Akihabara and bought no less than ten different distros (In those days internet -- at least in Japan was too slow to download iso's though we had a cd-burner in the lab!) including Slackware, Redhat, Debian etc and a external SCSI hard drive. We spent the whole next day in a doomed attempt to get one of the distros going in my (primarily Windows NT 3.5) computer. Linux got installed alright, but it always gave up on us when we tried to get the X-server started. After a day we had to give up! That is how friendly the Linux OS those days was! Of course we were trying to get the OS and the X Windows running.

This story came to my mind when I was sitting in front of the home computer running the latest Ubuntu Linux incarnation -- Edubuntu. A week ago we had another very friendly linux distribution -- Linux Mint, but we decided that we need a different system and Chandani downloaded the Edubuntu ISO, burned to a DVD and installed within an hour! We don't give seconds thoughts to the way these operating systems recognize all the hardware of the computer (sound, printers, card readers, external storage, etc., etc.) and configure itself without ever bothering the person in front of the computer! Our daughters use Linux at home to play games and access children's web sites. Recently I received a laptop running Windows 7. I installed Linux Mint side by side. After using the computer for about six months, I realize that I boot Windows 7 for only one purpose -- to use a Dutch Language learning CD-Rom that uses an ancient version of macro-media (yes! that was before adobe bought them!) flash. Especially when I travel, my Linux installation is a big relief as I don't have to worry that much about getting my computer infected with viruses from various Flash Memory sticks.

A lengthy journey

Linux came here via a long and hard path. Almost every year since 1997, I used to try installing Linux hoping that it would run better. Of course it did, even in 1998 the basic system - the OS and the X-server could run on a sufficiently mainstream PC. But, many integrated devices (e.g. sound) and peripherals (e.g. printers) did not work very well. But each time, things improved over the previous. By the time I was running atmospheric models (MM5) on RedHat 7.3, in 2002, things have become sufficiently painless in the PC department. Laptops were still difficult due to their often exotic hardware.

I felt sad when Redhat Inc. in 2003, gave up RedHat Linux, the most popular Linux variant at that time, and restricted itself to serving its corporate customers with RedHat Enterprise Linux. I chose the upgrade path of Scientific Linux for my workstations running atmospheric models. Killing RedHat gave Fedora OS to the community -- but that particular `hat' never felt the same for me!

Then came Ubuntu in 2004.