EEEnthusiasm

One of the main attractions of the EEE for me is the chance to get to learn a bit about Linux. I fooled around a bit with UNIX when I was in college, but then again who didn’t experiment with UNIX in college, right? Since then I’ve pretty much dealt exclusively with Windows. For those not in the know, it appears that Linux is a bright up and comer in the world of operating systems (I’m sure I could find lots of people who would argue with that statement). The thing about Linux is it’s free. It’s part of the whole open source, free software movement. Linux has been around for years with a rather unimpressive adoption rate (which is just one reason people might object to that earlier statement).

Why is it worth checking out Linux now? Well if you keep an eye out for this sort of thing you’ll notice a trend of local (and in some cases national) governments experimenting with swapping all of their desktops over to Linux. Wikipedia claims that the cities of Vienna and Munich have migrated all of their desktops to a Linux variants along with a host of other government initiatives by European, South American, and Asian countries. (I won’t bother typing in all the examples listed on Wikipedia). The reason is if you use Linux you don’t have to buy a license or pay to upgrade the operating system every few years. Even further, if you use Open Office you don’t have to buy or pay to upgrade Microsoft Office every few years. All that not paying Microsoft to license software adds up if you’re a government with 1000’s of desktops.

But I’m not a government with 1000’s of desktops, so why do I care? In a word: Google. Google builds and runs most of their technology on various flavors of Linux. Their search engines, Google Earth, their Andriod cell phone platform…all run on Linux. Chances are, if you doing some serious work with Google technology, you’re going to come in contact with Linux. So that’s more of my incentive to want to figure out Linux….that and it’s just plain fun to get to play around with a new computer. This last weekend with all of the reading of metadata registry specifications, predicate algebra descriptions, and natural deduction rule proving for school it was nice to be to sit down and relax with some recreational Linux tutorials.

So here’s the cool thing about the EEE - it comes with Linux on it, Xandros Linux to be exact. However, out of the box the Linux distribution is a bit crippled. Everything you need to run the full Linux install is there, but the EEE is configured to run a program that basically only gives you a limited GUI interface to interact with it. This is actually probably a pretty smart move on ASUS’s (the people who make the EEE) part. I’m sure they don’t want to field all the tech support calls from people who haven’t a computer before, not to mention all the people who haven’t used Linux before. The simple interface let’s you get to all provided programs easily and keeps you from getting yourself into trouble by playing around with options that probably don’t need playing around with.

But what if you want to get yourself into trouble? Good news. You just have to press Ctrl-Alt-T to open up a terminal window and after a bit of console wizardry you can enable the full Xandros Linux interface. The sky is the limit now. There are all sorts of strange things you can attempt to do using Linux and your EEE. I’ll cover one of those tomorrow.