Long ago, when personal computers were a novelty and thus were both much more exciting and much harder to use than they are nowadays, I ran a small consulting business in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was a technology geek: a real propeller head. I'd worked with engineering and computer companies, installing and servicing computers; then I moved up to designing them; then to programming them; and finally, I became a consultant, using my experience to help other people use computers.
My clients were folks who wanted to use personal computers in their businesses, but who needed help getting started. They weren't dummies, they merely lacked the technical knowledge that really was necessary back then in order to select, set up, and use a personal computer. I provided them with that knowledge; I gave them a jump start in the early days of the personal computer revolution.
Nowadays, PCs are old hat; they're a necessary part of almost every business in this country, large or small. Yet despite being so common, I've found that PCs are still a problem for many small businesses. Many businesses don't have staff that know how to use their PCs effectively. For example, I've run into small businesses that don't really know how to organize their data efficiently and back it up easily; how to protect their PCs against viruses; or how to keep the private business information on their PCs from being accessed by Internet intruders.
So it seems that there is still a need for propeller heads nowadays, no matter how often computer and software vendors claim that their systems are easy and safe to use. Hence this new column; when Tom Anderson of Sacra Blue invited me to write a regular column on any topics that I chose, I decided to write about ways that small businesses can better use their PCs. Welcome to Jump Start! I hope that you will find it not only useful, but enjoyable.
Penguin Days: Part 1
I've chosen a slightly unusual topic for my first set of columns. I'll tell you what I've chosen in a moment, but as an introduction to it, I'll talk a little bit about a phenomenon that I've noticed over the years: People quickly become fixed or rigid in the ways that they use their computer. Once they get it to do what they need to do, they usually don't change on their own. It's perfectly natural; computers are complex and un-natural, and most people are happy enough just to get the computer to do what they want, more or less.
And so, people quickly come to think that their computers work a certain way, and no other way. So, when they see a new version of Windows doing things in a totally different way on their same old PC, they get excited; it's like getting a whole new PC! I'm sure that Microsoft counts on that very human reaction whenever they release a new version of Windows.
The problem for small businesses, when upgrading to a new version of Windows, is that the new version invariably requires new hardware; you really can't use it efficiently on older PCs. Yet "older" may mean only one or two years old; and most small businesses can't afford to scrap their computers every few years.
Just like most folks, I'm not immune to the excitement of seeing a new operating system doing new things on my old PC. But Windows doesn't seem like a good way to do that; it's getting bigger and more complex, it demands more and more hardware power, it's full of security and privacy holes, and Microsoft's marketing and registration methods are steadily becoming more repugnant.
Fortunately, there are alternatives to Windows; the Linux operating system is the best known one. It's popular, powerful, inexpensive, and in some cases it can run older DOS and Windows applications. And so it occurred to me to install Linux and try to answer these questions:
How suitable is Linux as an alternative to Windows for a small business? Is it easy to install Linux and some typical small business software onto my existing PC? How much time, money, and effort does it take? How easy is it to use Linux to do most of my business tasks, instead of Windows? And finally: Can I really run my favorite old DOS and Windows applications under Linux?
My first few columns will try to answer those questions; so I'm calling this topic "Penguin Days" (the Linux mascot is a penguin). I hope that you'll be interested in the answers that I discover. I won't give step-by-step instructions for everything that I do; instead, I'll discuss the broader concepts, and give specific instructions only where appropriate. Along the way, I expect to make a few short side explorations of other PC-related matters.
Let's get started!
Choices, Choices
Unlike Windows, Linux comes in several flavors, or "distributions." That's because it's basically a free operating system, so it's easy for various groups to give it away, each with their own embellishments. So the very first step in installing Linux is choosing a distribution.
Some distributions are oriented towards technical users: programmers, Website creators, or server administrators. The "Debian," "Caldera," and "TurboLinux" distributions fall into that category. Others are intended for newcomers, so they are strong on automatic configuration, but don't have so many technical tools; "Mandrake" and "SuSE", for example. Most distributions come with several different flavors of GUI, more or less Windows-like. A few come with a standard suite of business apps such as Microsoft-compatible word processor and spreadsheet programs. At least one major distribution from Europe ("SuSE") is very full-featured, but reportedly has a slightly nonstandard installation that can cause headaches down the road. Quite a few of the distributions come in very low cost or free versions, but are also available in versions that cost several hundred dollars, mostly because they provide technical help as part of the package.
Faced with so many choices, I made up a short list of the features that I wanted in my distribution:
- It had to be full-featured, including lots of technical and programming tools (since my consulting is mostly engineering-oriented).
- It had to be well-documented (since I hadn't messed with Linux in several years, and that was with a very early release that was poorly documented).
- It had to have a couple of different GUIs (so that I could find the one that suited me best).
- It had to have good software management tools (since I expected to install and remove quite a few applications while learning about Linux).
- It had to be very cheap; preferably free (so that I wouldn't lose much if my experiments were a failure).
- And of course, it had to run on the equipment that I already own, so that I wouldn't have to upgrade my PC (a 600 MHz Pentium III system with a USB modem, an HP CD-Writer drive, two different HP printers, an old Mustek parallel-port scanner, a PCI industrial data acquisition board for measuring and controlling electrical signals, and a few less important USB peripherals).
Once I had this basic wish list, I went to a technical bookstore and browsed their most recent books about installing and using Linux. There were plenty of books to choose from, and many of them contained complete Linux distributions on CD-ROMs. Several of the books had introductory sections describing the different Linux distributions, and those helped me to decide upon Red Hat Linux, version 7. Red Hat is probably the most common distribution in the USA, and it has received many favorable reviews. The books and articles that I read showed that Red Hat fulfilled almost all of my requirements.
The one exception was a big one: hardware compatibility. This can be a major headache, even in Windows. If your hardware vendor doesn't supply drivers for your operating system, you can't use the hardware. At best, it will sit in your PC without doing anything useful; at worst, it will actively stop your PC from working properly.
Not all vendors work hard at providing Linux drivers for their hardware; in fact, many don't support Linux at all. A lot of the Linux drivers that are available have been created by programmers who, while doing the best that they can, are severely hampered because they don't work for the manufacturers, so they're not privy to the technical information needed to write the drivers.
On the other hand, it appears that, once a driver has been created for a particular piece of hardware, it is generally made available to the entire Linux community; many distributions of Linux will include it. It's not right to say that Red Hat, for example, is much better or worse about supporting a particular device than any other Linux vendor.
So the main difficulty is knowing in advance whether the current version of Linux will support the hardware. It's not too practical to print a list of every single supported device, in a book or on a box holding a set of CDs. Since I was installing Linux as an experiment, I decided to proceed even though I wasn't sure about compatibility. Later on, I'll talk about what I learned in that area.
If you need to check what hardware devices are supported, you should visit the Web site of the distribution vendor of your choice. For example, Red Hat's Hardware Compatibility List.
Before you choose a distribution, I recommend that you pick up any of the popular Linux magazines at a bookstore to browse the advertisements and learn about the different Linux distributions and vendors. And if you can find or download a copy, you might want to check out Bill Ulrich's nice article on "Choosing Linux" in the November 13, 2001, issue of PC Magazine.
Leaving the hardware compatibility issue open for the time, I bought one of the popular "Dummies" books that seemed to cover Red Hat Linux well without being too wordy. It included a large part of the full Red Hat distribution on three CD-ROMs (the retail version takes up seven CD-ROMs), and had a very reasonable price. (The book is Red Hat Linux 7 for Dummies, by Jon Hall and Paul Sery, published by Hungry Minds, Inc., ISBN 0-7645-0795-8.) I was pleased to find a decent book that also had the distribution that I wanted. (Imagine if you could buy a $30 book about the latest version of Windows, and it actually included a legitimate copy of Windows on CD!)
Other Ways to Get Linux
If you can't find a book/distribution combination that fills your particular needs, there are some alternatives. You can simply purchase a distribution of Linux at a computer store. Many times, that will be a less expensive "limited" distribution, without all the possible bells and whistles of a "full" distribution. Or you can purchase a full distribution directly from the vendor by phone or over the Internet. Some distributions are available as downloads over the Internet, but they are pretty big downloads, and they are also trickier to work with than CD-ROMs. Finally, you can get in touch with a Linux user's group in your area. They often have free CDs to give out, and they sometimes put on "install-fests".
Those are meetings where they install Linux on your PC for you. That doesn't appeal to me as much as installing it myself, because I'll be the one maintaining the system; I need to understand the process. I've also noted that the authors of Linux books tend to be a bit more restrained and objective than user group members when it comes to discussing the relative merits of the different distributions; you might want to bear that in mind when listening to the spirited discussions at most Linux user group meetings.
An Escape Route
It's possible to install Linux on the same hard disk that holds Windows. That has a few benefits: You can easily boot either Linux or Windows; you can use Linux to read and write Windows files; and you don't have to install a different hard disk in your PC. On the other hand, I use my PC for business-critical work every day, so I'm pretty wary of messing it up while doing these Linux experiments (even though I back it up quite frequently).
So I will install Linux on a new hard drive. It's not expensive: A suitable hard drive costs well under $100 nowadays. And on my PC (an HP Vectra tower), it's very easy to open up the case and swap hard drives. By using a separate hard drive, I'll leave myself an escape route back to my familiar system, in case I mess up. It's an engineering maxim that I follow as much as I can: "Plan to throw the first one away."
Ready to Start
I've chosen and acquired a Linux distribution; I've got installation and use instructions; and I've bought a new hard disk so that I won't risk my existing Windows installation. I'm not far enough along to answer the Linux questions that I proposed—there's a lot of work to be done first!—but it's a good place to end this first installment of Jump Start. I'm looking forward to installing Linux and writing about that process in the next installment.
