Using Linux and About Linux

Linux was really born in 1991 when Linus Torvalds wrote in the comp.os.minix newsgroup:-

Do you pine for the nice days of Minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modeify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on Minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you.

As I mentioned a month ago, I'm working on a free version of a Minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It's even reached the stage where it's even useable (thogh may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for distribution. It's just version 0.2... but I've successfully run bash, gcc, GNU make, GNU sed, compress, etc. under it.

This small version 0.02 operating system was soon to become known as Linux, and little did he know that this "small" minix-lookalike was to become the empire of such contraversy that it is today!!!

You see, without the free tools provided by GNU, Linus would not have gotten anywhere with his operating system and he has these people to tank for it!

What do I do with all of these .tar.gz files

These files have been tarred and gzipped, you see, Gzip is like winzip, only it can only compress one file at a time, so what a lot of people do is put all of the files into a tarball using the Tar command and then Gzip the tarball which compresses it to a more manageable file depending on the contents of the file. Here is an example:-

To extract the files from a Gzipped Tarball:-
tar xvzf <filename.tar.gz>
The X argument tells the command that it is a file to be extracted, it then extracts all of the archived files as verbosed, it then unzips the file so that it becomes filename.tar and then everything will be placed in a directory underneath where you extracted them from, the output from tar will tell you where to look.

Running Windows Applications Under Linux!!!

OK, firstly, you must be logged in as root, have Windows installed and mounted under /mnt for a lot of programs, you must then go into the /etc directory and edit wine.conf, it may be hidden so select this option from the view menu. Go down to the line that says c:\windows\ and remove the backslash at the end as this prevents it from working for some reason or other, now go around the file and check that everything is OK, now save the file. My windows drive is mounted as /mnt/maxtor so I would type

cd /mnt/maxtor

At the command line, then I would CD to the path of the application I wanted to run so:-

cd Program\ Files
cd Microsoft\ Office
cd office
wine winword.exe

And this would load Microsoft Word 2000 under Linux, remember though, it doesnt work with everything, some games may run, here are a list of applications that I have had success with:-

Windows Notepad
Windows Calculator
Winzip 6, 7 & 8
Microsoft Word 6 & 97
Winamp
ICQ
Internet Explorer 4

That's all for now folks!

Page last updated on 15/08/2000 or 08/15/2000 depending on where you live!!