[Linuxcommand-announce] [LinuxCommand.org: Tips, News And Rants] The Unix (Linux) Frame Of Mind

[William S. <bs...@pa...>]

If you are migrating from Windows to Linux, one of the barriers you
will encounter (besides the myriad superficial differences in the user
interface) is the whole "culture thing."Using a Unix-like operating
system involves more than learning where the buttons are located on the
desktop. It requires a different way of thinking about your computer.
On top of that, Linux requires that you learn about your relationship
with the Free and open source software communities. That will be the
subject, no doubt, of many future postings, but for now we'll talk
about the Unix frame of mind.To understand Unix, you have to understand
its historical context. Unix certainly has its faults, but if you
understand its history, you can see that many of its "features" are due
to the state of computing during its formative years. But it's also
important to realize that just because something is old does not mean
that it is necessarily bad. Take for instance, the command line
interface. If you listen to pundits and the PC magazine writers, you
would think that the command line is the equivalent of waterboarding to
the modern computer user. I liken use of a graphical user interface to
watching television and the command line to reading a book. They are
very different, but both are valid (and valuable) if used in the proper
way.So what is "the Unix frame of mind?" It is based on some the
following principles:The computer is multi-user. Unix was designed
for "big" computers. Big, expensive computers that supported many users
at the same time. This has a number of implications. For one, it meant
a different security model. On a multi-user computer, it is essential
that one user cannot trash another user, or the entire system. It also
implies that communities can form among the computer's users. If you
have Fedora or any of the other Red Hat family of Linux distributions,
you may have noticed that it runs sendmail by default. This is part of
the Unix tradition. Users on a system send email to each other. The
first form of instant messaging was the write command which sent a text
message to another user's terminal session.Automate everything. Back in
the 1960's IBM used a marketing slogan, "Machines should work. People
should think." Yet today, we have millions of office workers sitting in
front of PCs pumping their mice all day. Why? It's because the computer
is not doing the work. The human is. The Unix way is to instruct the
computer how to do the work and then forget about it. Back in the 1990s
I marveled at the cron daemon. It could perform tasks on a scheduled
basis. I remember leaving my PC on all night and letting it do the work
I needed and having a summary of the results each morning. It did the
work so I didn't have to.Everyone programs. The computer is a tool, or
rather, it is a huge collection of tools that can be arranged to
perform work. To do this, you must program. You have to break your
tasks into simple steps and arrange the tools to perform them. Unix
actually makes this fairly simple. You can create pipelines of commands
or write shell scripts. Have you noticed how, over the years, Windows
has removed all the programming tools from its system? This keeps the
users helpless. If they want a solution, they have to go out and buy
it. By contrast, every major Linux distribution includes the shell,
perl, python, text editors and thousands of tools for building
solutions. If you need more, there is just about every programming tool
under the sun available for immediate download.A computer is not "easy
to use." That is a marketing myth. A computer is no more easy to use
than a violin, but with much study and practice, both can produce
beautiful music.It all depends on your frame of mind.Every Linux user
should learn something about the history of Unix. The Wikipedia is a
good place to start:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnixAlso check out
Eric Raymond's The Art Of Unix
Programming:http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

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Posted By William Shotts to LinuxCommand.org: Tips, News And Rants at
2/20/2009 08:45:00 PM