Adventures with AOL broadband silver (uk) on Linux(and they said it was impossible!)

Note. Written in 2006 before AOL UK was sold off. There will come a time when this article gets out of date, though I will try to keep it current.

What is Linux anyway? and what is a Distro?

"It is often rumoured that if you play a Windows CD backwards it will summon Satan.
Well that's nothing, if you play it forwards it installs Windows"...Anon.

Pronounced "leen-ucks" or "linnucks" (but NEVER "Line-Ucks" or everyone will know you are a newbie), Linux is the brainchild of Linus Torvalds (pronounced Leen-ous), a Finnish computing genius who wrote his own Unix based operating system as an undergraduate around 1991 because MS DOS/Windows 3.1 was not up to the job of reading his Unix email online. What started as an off-syllabus project at Helsinki University to find out how the new 386 chip worked, within a week or two had already outclassed MS DOS in multi-tasking; Such was, and is, the genius of Torvalds, but the most innovative development was to open up his code to all the other "hackers" to comment and improve upon.

Despite negative connotations of the word, real "hackers" are the self motivated software enthusiasts who persist in finding a way of making software and hardware work together out of pure enjoyment, the best way they can; as opposed to corporate "suits" (like I was) who got paid to program to a fixed design using a fixed systems-life-cycle and project-management methodology. History has shown that despite the claims of corporate clients demanding 'CMM compliant' methodologies, hackers tend to produce better quality bug-free code than suits, usually faster and more cost effectively. It's all down to motivation. For someone who used to teach CMM that's a very sad discovery.

Over a period of time the development of Linux was being shared with hundreds of like-minded programmers. Thousands are involved in producing over 300 "Distros". It is now the largest collaborative project of all timewith two million registered users of Linux in some form or another.

The Free Software Concept

The Free or Open software principle is that all code is freely available to anyone, new code is shared openly with the rest of the world, Nobody can make serious money out of the kernel code through copyright of the code, although it has to be patented to protect its free status. That means generally that Linux is always free to download to us the potential users. Torvalds still retains the right to steer the direction that the kernel is taking.

What organizations can do is to combine the kernel with a number of Office type applications and an installer system, and call it a "Distribution" or "Distro". People can make money out of support, particularly selling to other organizations. Companies producing the SuSE and Red Hat distros for example can legitimately charge for support and installation services. Even so there are many who think that large software companies may put commercial considerations before the principles of Open Source Software if the going gets tough. Some also feel that distros produced by groups of enthusiasts in their spare time, like PCLinuxOS are closer to the concept.
IBM are one of the biggest hardware manufacturers to support Linux, pouring in over a billion dollars into its development.

Many people say there are more "pros" than "cons", for example it is very unlikely for a virus to attack Linux because a program has to know the Root user passsword, and so you NEVER use the internet logged-on as Root.
In similar fashion you can stealth your Windows machine by everyday usage (email, surfing) with a Username which has restricted user authority, rather than having "Administrator" rights that you are given by defult on installing Windows. Also you can disable file sharing etc, but as soon as you neeed to install a minor piece of software in Windows or do a defrag you need to log on as Administrator again. Also Microsoft cannot download their "updates" when you don't have Admin rights so they don't like it. Most home Windows users plod along with Administrator rights and get all sorts of rootkits and trojans installed without knowing about them.
In most cases with Linux the system asks for the Root password and carries on - much safer.

Viruses can be passed-on to friends and colleagues by emails however, so if you run email servers you need anti-virus tools, or if you communicate with others by email you should use a provider with email virus checking, such as BT Yahoo or AOL. You will thereby avoid being a "carrier".
If you like to have control of your OS implementation, then the Linux shell commands (which are like DOS in a way) give you that control. Nowadays however, most Linux distributions ("distros") have good Windows-like graphical user interfaces and inclusive applications.

What is the catch?

Well none of your applications that run on MS Windows will run on Linux. (Well some will run under "Wine" but that's another story) However there are hundreds of applications that do the same job. For example OpenOffice.org v 2.0 will do almost everything that MS Office will do, including read and write .doc .xls .ppt etc files, but for free. There is a version of OpenOffice.org that will run on Windows as well, by the way, and many foreign government departments are choosing it especially the far east and the south americas.

One reason I retain Windows 2000 on my PC is to run my Canon 9950F scanner which will not run under Linux. Also some apps like HP photo printing, DVD shrink, BBC radio player, BBC TV 7-day recall etc are simply much easier and sometimes better on Windows. Again you need to decide if you want the challenge without the constant attacks from Malware on Linux, or simplicity of use but need to be vigilent and run anti-malware suites on Windows.

User Support

Another problem is that you will not get any "support" from the Linux suppliers if you didn't pay for commercial support. There is nobody to "complain" to. It's an operating system you load for FUN and for a mental challenge. But then the on-line and forum support is as good as for any paid-for operating systems, except that you don't "complain" to the on-line forums, you work with them! If you do want helpdesk support then go for a paid-for distro like Linspire. However you need to decide how much free support you get from Microsoft, Mac etc before you decide this is an issue.

So how did I do?

Well it wasn't easy for someone who had been a Windows user for 22 years, but then I was a programmer once upon a time, so it took a couple of weeks of reading Linux mags, books and online forums to get to grips with the terminology at least. I would recommend two books - the Linux Desktop Pocket Guideby David Brickner ISBN 0-596-10104-X and the Linux Pocket Guideby Daniel J Barrett ISBN 0-596-00628-4 (both published by O Reilly). The former gives a lot if info about which is the best distro for your PC and how they work, including a chapter on Laptops. The latter gives the essential shell commands, because sometimes you might need them to do basic admin. It also tells you how the file system works, for example.

Which Distro did I opt for?

There are mainstream distros such as Fedora Red Hat, Debian, Slackware etc which will certainly work on new machines. I wanted to try it out on my old IBM 600X so I had a word with The Linux Manand he recommended STX(pronounced "sticks" apparently) for older hardware. In fact it will run quite happily on any Pentium with 64Mb RAM with all the speed over the web of a brand new PC. The Linux-man provides a "live" CD distro of STX for a few quid. You can download it free as an .iso file but you need to burn it to CD first.
(Since writing this article I have successfully loaded Ubuntu 6.06 and PClinuxOS V0.93 on this and other laptops with great success. Ubuntu and PClinuxOS unlike STX also has a large number of applications such as OpenOffice.
STX is a lightweight German distro and has all the drivers for both of my IBM laptops, including my belkin PCMCIA USB2.0 hub, so I achieved high speed USB on an old IBM boiler that normlly struggles to provide USB1!
I decided to dual-boot, which means that I used the live disk to format the old Windows "D" drive for the two linux partitions (Swap and Root partitions) and to load up the STX system. All you do is tell the pc to boot from the CD-ROM, and follow the instructions from the STX website, or the note that the Linux-man kindly included with the disc. STX recognises Windows (which must be loaded first) and sets up
1) a bootloader called LILO so you can choose which operating system to use at boot-up, and
2) read-only access to the Windows "C" drive.
If you do need to reload Windows (especially XP), it will probably zap the boot loader, so you may then have to reload Linux or learn how to restore the MBR, which will vary with different distros.

What about AOL - I thought you were stuck with Windows and the USB modem??

Well no, in a nutshell. Not if you have AOL 9.0 or better on ADSL. Howeveryou will not get any help from AOL if you call them and say
"my AOL will not connect, and by the way I am not using your bloated software, or your nasty little error prone 105 modem, oh and I am not using Windows either, and it's plugged into my study, not the BT master socket which is in the hallway.". They politely tell you to reinstate their system and then call back, by which time AOL has come back anyway (I know, I tried it, and they did, and it usually did).
Another problem is that you will not be able to manage your AOL email using the Organize files. If you want to know what the AOL experience in Linux will be like, load Firefox onto your Windows machine, browse www.aol.co.uk (or whichever) in Firefox and connect to your email. What you see is what you will have in Linux. If you enjoy the Buddy system, AOL shopping channels, parental controls, using more than one Screen name at a time, etc etc, stay with Windows! (Now that you've downloaded Firefox, like 15%+ of the market you will not want to go back to IE!)

I managed to get onto AOL with Linux both using USB and Ethernet modems, which I describe shortly, but first some preparation.

Preparation

1. You will need some means of downloading the Linux software. DO NOT use Internet Explorer. For some reason there is a bug in IE6 which corruptsthe .tar.gz and the .tgz Linux zipped files - funny Microsoft haven't been able to fix that bug eh?? So the first thing is to download Firefox which is a brilliant fast un-bloated browser. Search for Firefox Download on Google.
2. You will still need Windows so you can run that lovely AOL software for creating screen names (for example) so unless you are lucky enough to have two PCs, you should leave a small partition on the hard disk for the C drive and Windows. If you already have a D Drive you can possibly re-use that for Linux. Most distros use some sort of partition tool to carve up your hard disk appropriately. Otherwise download GParted which is a bit like P@rtition-Magic except it's FREE. It's a bootable application on a .iso file which you burn to CD, or get it from The Linux ManIt's worth getting even if you stay with Windows.
If you are starting from scratch, you may want to try and create a FAT32 (not NTFS) partition for Windows so you can write to the Windows drive from Linux (can be handy). Linux can read but cannot write to NTFS as that file system is not yet open to public gaze.
3. Learn as much as you can by reading books and certain mags, but don'tread any Linux library books older that 2005!! Linux is now improving faster thanks to the dedicated worldwide "hackers", than the Mega Corporations can manage with an army of "suits". What is more, any bugs are found faster due to the open nature of the code.
4. Get Linux. either:-
a) Buy a book and disk combo e.g. SuSE or Fedora - around £40
b) Buy a Linux magazine with a cover disk - around £10
c) Go to the The Linux Man- around £3 or
d) Download an .iso file from a distro's website and burn to CD - Free!

USB

Click Here to see how I set up AOL using the standard Voyager 105 USB modem

Ethernet

Click Here to see how I set up AOL on an ethernet modem

Conclusions and post script.

In 2006/7, Linux is in a very advanced stage, well up with XP and in many ways more advanced. I now have PClinuxOS V0.93a on my IBM T22 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on my 600X laptops, which were really sweet installations. I can create office documents, print them (with a subset of printer options), create web pages with an excellent product called Quanta Plus, and ftp them to my domain provider much more easily than in Windows (providers are usually Unix servers). I don't get deluged with pop-ups, and I don't need to run anti-virus. I keep a small Windows 2000 partition for my scanner, and to keep my ISP happy (moved from AOL to BT Total) if I need "support" officially.
All in all Linux with AOL was a success, though it was not happy with an "always-on" modem so I decided to change to BT Total. They still don't "support" Linux (May 2007) but at least they provide decent always-on modems such as BT Voyager 220V and BT Home Hub, with an ethernet port suitable for Linux. With these modern modems however you may need to check your wiring to get the best broadband speed.

AND I can now call everyone "dude" (you need to read Torvalds autobiography "Just for Fun" to understand that one!)
Look at my Linux Linkspage for some interesting resources.

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