I still don’t care about Myst/Uru currently. I’ll pick up on it later…perhaps after I’ve been invited to the online game.
As far as money is concerned, I’m not spending money on any impulses. I’m eating food 90% of the time from Albertsons instead of fast food. I took the class that’s required so my license isn’t suspended. I’m going to return the cable modem from Bright House this weekend. I’m going to take care of my debt to Progress Energy. I’m going to pay my credit card bills with the next paycheck.
I’m working with Linux on a laptop from work right now. I’ve installed Core Linux on it, which is a core distribution without the GUI interface and plethora of other libraries and programs that come with Linux distributions normally. I can download and install other software as I learn the system, thus understanding what files belong to the core operating system and which ones I’ve installed.
I’m also picking up on other things. I have a book on Linux for becoming certified, and I used it before to try to understand the Red Hat or Mandrake installations I had made, but its making more sense now that I’m working with a basic command line installation of GNU/Linux.
Something interesting that most people don’t know is that the whole operating system, or even most of it, wasn’t provided by Linus Thorvald (the creator of Linux).
This is how Red Hat and Mandrake Linux distributions became:
In 1984 a guy named Richard Stallman started something called the GNU Project. Basically they didn’t like how companies created software and didn’t let other people see how the software works inside by viewing the source code. At the time of the operating system of choice was Unix. They wanted to create an operating system like Unix with a license that ensures open source. There might be more to it, but I’m not completely clear on what their license says about the price of it. I know in addition to the source code being available that any additions the code that you make you can claim as your own thus halting the progress of the development.
Anyway, back to what they were doing. They started developing this system, known as the “GNU system”. They were working on it until Linus Thorvald came up with the Linux kernel. The kernel is the software that performs very low level functions such as memory management, hardware access, etc. GNU was working on a kernel at the time, but they had alot of work to do on it still. In fact, they didn’t finish it until 2001, known as “Hurd”.
So, they worked on the GNU system so it would work with this Linux kernel that Linux Thorvald made, and released it as the GNU/Linux system. Since then many people have organized groups to program certain things for this GNU/Linux system. One of the most popular web servers on the net is the Apache web server, made initially for Linux, and hence most of these servers run Apache on GNU/Linux systems. So many many server programs and other applications, including a graphical user interface, have been developed for that system. Organizations have decided to package various different combinations of all this software to make the different distributions you see.
I’ve worked in a text based OS interface before (DOS) and I know a great deal about computers in general, and even I have been frustrated with GNU/Linux, but I think I’m going to start to catch on now. Now that I’m beginning to understand this, I’m going to make an easy to understand site on learning GNU/Linux using the Core distribution that I’m learning on.