Linux - R.I.P.

Here we go again, another anti-Linux rant ...

Well not _exactly_, but here is an illustration of how "naff" Linux is to a long-time Microsoft DOS/Windows user :-

When I set out to learn about Linux, I had two objectives. The first objective was to learn about Linux, obviously.

The second was to run a web server (ie host web sites on my own equipment in my own home).

Both of these objectives were achieved up to a point, but when it came to hosting web sites I also wanted to learn about the analysis of traffic associated with those sites.

To that end I installed "Webalizer" and that is where the problems with Linux really came to a head.

The darned program kept the access logs created by Apache so locked up that Webalizer was unable to access them. No matter what I tried the result was always the same.

For the sake of comparison I then decieded to load both Apache and Webalizer onto a Windows XP machine.

I got Apache up and running on the Windows machine in probably not much longer than half an hour (I was familiar with the way the Apache configuration files worked, so I wasn't exactly starting from scratch), and Webalizer was installed and activated in pretty much the same amount of time.

Webalizer on Windows is now happily producing the web stats I was trying to get from the Linux installation, all with about an hour's worth of effort.

Well at least I tried!

Linux seems to me to be a bit "exclusive", rather like a Golf Club.

Golf Clubs don't really like to see the "ordinary bloke on the street" cluttering up their courses and facilities, so they make membership difficult to achieve (by charging lots of money, or by imposing conditions on would-be members, etc etc) whilst pretending that membership is "open to all". The reality is different, it's a hobby for the "chosen few".

Am I referring to Golf Clubs or Linux in the last statment? I'll leave the reader of this to be the judge of that!

Why I (think I) Hate Linux!

A while ago I decided that I just had to find out about Linux.

Why? Because it was there, probably.

It was supposed to be "the dog's whatsits" and "free", and "capable of running on low spec machines", etc etc, so I installed Debian on an old surplus PC and ran it.

A day or two later it fell over due to having used up all the allocated hard disk space, so I gave up. I hate giving up!

Some time later I reasoned that one really had to have a proper reason for learning something as arcane as Linux, and when I though really hard about it I thought that it would be a worthwhile objective to run a web server and host some web sites, and Linux seemed to be an ideal vehicle with which to do just that. If I should become reasonably competent at hosting web sites, it might conceivably save me some money too! (My commericially hosted sites don't actully consume much network bandwidth!)

I regard myself as "computer literate", but not really a "computer geek" - I can do a bit of HTML, I used to program BBC Micros for fun in my younger days in Basic and Assembler, but once PCs running Windows took over, my expertise remained at the level of getting Windows PCs working properly.

So I decided to set up a dual-boot PC (having two sons who have upgraded to bigger and faster PCs, subsidised to a certain degree by a benevolent parent I find I have "erstwhile fast" PCs to spare) running a newly installed Kubuntu distribution as well as the previously installed Windows XP.

I experienced no major problems in getting this working as an operating system with a useable GUI, so I then set about installing and configuring the famous Apache web server and other sundry "helper" applications such as ProFTPd, Webmin, Webalizer, etc.

This is where it all started to get a tad too "interesting" for comfort.

Apache itself installed without too many problems, getting it configured proved slightly problematical, but I got there in the end. There is an abundance of "help" on the internet as you might expect, but one heck of a lot of seemingly contradictory information. We all get used to that, so no big deal. BUT, I am getting the impression that the Linux community in general isn't exactly what you would call "inclusive". If you use Google, say, to find information on a particular problem you may have it returns lots of hits. Good. Some of the information results from people having exactly the same issues that you are having (reassuring) but often the requests for information result in "if you are so stupid as to be even asking that question, then why are you running Linux, you should stick with Windows, dunderhead!" (I paraphrase). It appears that the Geeks want to retain Linux for themselves!

A little bit further along the path of discovery I decided that I would really like to sort out the mess which my Linux box had got into by a combination of failed updates and my own incompetence, in other words completely reformat the PC and start again from scratch, but with enhanced knowledge and hopefully a reasonable prosepect of "doing it right".

Now in order to do that, my little hosted web sites would be offline for however long it took me to get up and running again, so I thought it would be nice to have a "backup server" to put on line whilst I did this.

Again after a bit of thought I reckoned a nice way forward would be to install Linux onto a USB hard drive which I happened to have available, get the web server running on that with a copy of the relevant files, and run this from another PC whilst I did the necessary on the main Linux box. Great idea, I thought. I had originally considered trying to achieve this objective using a USB pen drive, but eventually decided against it, as I felt I needed to define the IP address of the host machine, and the USB pen drive version I tried only allowed DHCP address allocation. This may not necessarily have been a show-stopper, but I decided against it anyway.

So another Kubuntu installation was born, with a lot of advice from Pendrive Linux and Apache installed, along with a number of the other "helper" applications I mentioned above.

You would have thought that getting all this working would have been practically the same as the first time round wouldn't you? Wrong!
All kinds of configuration anomalies cropped up - all were dealt with but I rather resented having to do it at all!

Additionally the bootloader/manager (GRUB) appears to have done bizarre things to my host PC such that I can't even boot into Windows unless my USB hard drive is connected and on line. This may have been due to "hidden" partitions on my Dell PC being made visible - Windows/DOS if I recall correctly can only be booted from the first partition on a hard drive - GRUB found out about the Dell recovery partition and made it visible. (Is this a beef about MS-DOS or GRUB, I'm not exactly sure which?)

Plus I still haven' figured out how to gain access to all those Apache access logs so that can analyze them ... (Something to do with PIDs and locked files and permissions and CRON jobs and other aspects of sheer undiluted Geekiness ... (I think!))

To summarise all of the above what I would say is that (a) Linux isn't really for non-Geeks, and seems destined to remain so and (b) if you want reminding of how Windows used to be prior to Windows 95 in terms of getting stuff working and being fragile, then go ahead and install Linux!