I am new to Linux in the past few months but have learnt a lot quickly especially with the help of this site. Something I have seen today interests me though. My sisters partners father has a website called jeepster.org.uk.

He is a slackware user and a lot of the site is devoted to Linux and code he has written etc etc. There is a banner on the site which refers to a link with a petition and information on boycotting SCO. Looking into what the news maybe it seems that SCO are saying it has took them 20 years to get what they have got together and they are running 16, 32 and 64 processor systems which linux could only dream about.

This makes me think that to get good money in the IT industry you need to know how to operate unix servers and systems.

What is the best way to use my learning about linux on my pc instead of windows to get me the job in IT I would like to do. Is there and distros that I could put on another partition to try that have more of a unix feel??

Any suggestions??

I have to comment, boycotting SCO = great idea. SCO running on "16, 32, and 64 processor machines that linux can only dream about"?!? That is total nonsense. Linux is WAY better at SMP then Unixware could ever dream of being.

The fact of the matter is SCO's UNIX is terrible. They know it is terrible, they know we know it is terrible. It is near impossible to sell such a terrible UNIX with Linux around. They can't possibly compete with the development speed Linux has because they can't hire millions of programmers. So they throw in the towl on there software and try and make money in another way, but claiming ownership of something that isn't, and never was, there code.

Sorry, I have another comment

There is a reason why Open Source software is so scary to many people who make there money off proprietary software. What looked to most to be an unorganized mess in the early and mid 90's has come together as a bunch of very powerful pieces of software. Now people see things like Apache and Linux, they look at the quality of the code, and how fast it gets churned out, and they realized they can't possibly churn out code of that quality nearly as quick, if ever.

Some companies, like IBM, attempt to evolve with what they see as the best way to produce software. Others try and fight it with threats and FUD because they are scared to give away the control.

When you talk about the power and the quality of the source with apache what do you mean?

And what is the nearest to Unix like distro available? I have been using slackware since starting out??

Well, Apache is a great example of how Open Source development can really work. There was a time when AIX and Solaris and what not had there own web servers. Then Apache came around and slowly IBM started to notice that everyone was wanting support for Apache on AIX. Apache was developed fairly quickly, and it is perhaps one of the most elegantly programmed pieces of software ever created. It took over the world of web servers like wild fire. Now well over half of the web servers in the world run it. IBM got smart and instead of fighting it they embraced it and supported it on AIX. Sun pretty much did the same thing with Solaris and all other UNIX vendors pretty much followed suit. These days Apache is synonymous with UNIX web servers.

As far as UNIX like distro's, I would go for Slackware, Debian, or Gentoo. Or try out FreeBSD or one of the other BSD flavors.

ok. Thanks for that you know your stuff

i have a quick question,
eventually i would love to be part of helping to develop linux systems..
but how do you get into writing code for such systems?
how did people here start off? C++ programming...or what?

and how long has it taken you to learn how to develop parts of linux

Kane

yes that is a good question kane

I would also like to know if some of the time spent and the new members can say what some of their goals were when first embarking on using linux.

I have a list sort of in my head...

1) Install and get a feel for linux from using windows
2) Learn how to use the command line more and get my head round some of the principles of linux.
3) Configure down to the last bit my hardware to run optimally with the available drivers for linux.
4) Learn how to compile a custom kernel.
5) Learn what packages I use and the ones I dont so I can create a custom more slickSlack installation.
6) Learn how to make an installation CD with the custom packages and config, (fstab, custom kernel, lilo) pre-written for my PC
7) Move on to the more deeper parts of the OS such as networking and security.

What do you think guys??

I started off writing C myself. I played around with a few simple things and wrote a small device driver for a digital I/O card I had laying around. I think the manufacturer even had there own driver for it, but I wanted to have my own interrupt handler so I could count the inputs and when I got to a certain number very quickly turn on the outputs. It was insanely simple, but it got me through the basics of writing linux drivers and got me a little familiar with kernel code. You'll find much of the kernel code itself, along with a good number of applications are written in C. C++ is becoming more and more common though, especially with wonder API's like Qt.

As far as how long it took to get started, I dunno, I hacked around with it for about 2 years before I got any real work done on it. But that was only because I was still in school and I didn't get a job for the first few years. My biggest problem was always thinking of something useful to code, not so much the coding itself. Everytime I could think of an application I wanted I found somebody else had already done it.

jtshaw
you say you were still at school
how did u find out/learn about writing C? was it books or what? and how did you find out about writing drivers...

I learned C my sophomore year in high school when I took a programming class. Didn't start using linux until college though as that was really the first time I had a PC nobody else used but me. As far as drivers work, I used an earlier addition of the O'Reilly Linux Device Drivers which is available for free on-line.

Learning C isn't all that difficult, but it can be hard to understand some of the more complex concepts. As a result I found I learned it best from a teacher, but I am sure it is possible to pick it up from a book as well.

jtshaw

what os were you using then to write the drivers? while you were at school what os did they use? i am interested to know this because bbc and acorn pcs and real early macs were there with me but thats in the UK.

Rob

When I first wrote those drivers I was a freshmen in college and was using Slackware Linux (7.0 maybe?) with the 2.2.something kernel. Before that I was programming C with Borland's compiler on a Windows 95 machine because that is what my high school had. I went to Georgia Tech for college and they had a lab full of RedHat boxes and the CS professors really liked to use the linux tools which is probably what got me interested in trying linux in the first place.

I ended up using Slackware first because the guy that helped me was a Slackware user since 1993 or whenever slack first started. Most of the linux specific stuff I picked up from O'Reilly Books (they were easy to find in the library cause they all look the same) and man pages.

Based on your signature do you think Linus Torvalds would ever do anything the brute force way?

Heh... I am sure he has. Every once in a while everyone gets frustrated and ends up using brute force. Brute force is often easy in the short run, but you usually end up paying in terms of crappy code in the long run.