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Linux is the way forward, is it? The future of alternative computing and all that? My experience of Unix machines only covers the terminals at uni and I wasn’t impressed, although I think they probably had outdated kernels and were badly configured – I never even got around to installing LinuxAPUS on my trusty PPC-powered Amiga (you shouldn’t laugh).

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The road ahead

So, is it worth installing LinuxAPUS and the basic Red Hat distribution that appeared on an AFCD and joining the Linux revolution? I remain to be convinced. Colin Buchanan, via email (from LXF001)

Nick (original editor) said…

Linux is certainly gaining momentum as an ‘alternative’ OS, and it is probably being installed on more computers every day than any other operating system.

If you know a bit about computers, Linux isn’t really that difficult. In many cases, the installation is what most people find trickiest, so if you can master that, I’m sure you’ll find the rest a doddle.

I think a PPCAmiga running Linux (especially if you have a graphics card) would be a pretty good setup. I haven’t yet installed Linux on my home Amiga due to a lack of drive space, but a few years ago, I ran FreeBSD on a PPC A4000 and it worked very well.

Fun for all

Linux brings back the fun old days of messing with my speccy and ZX81. It reminds me, too, of why I first got into computing – the fun of hacking about with code and seeing something eventually work. Brilliant!

Are you planning on running any programming articles? It’s a shame that so much space is given over to configuration and administration. The best thing about Linux to me is the set of development tools and libraries that you get for free. Industry-standard development tools, too – I’ve been using the likes of Make, Yacc, Lex, Awk, Perl, G++, Gdb, the X libraries, system libraries and so on since 1987.