by Alex Brown
In our computer repair classes, we focus on hardware problems, not paying much attention to the software we use as we do the work. Much of it is older free software or shareware based on MS-DOS, which has been in use for many years. Newer machines, however, are sometimes not easy to test with DOS software tools. Microsoft Windows 95/98 has become the best test and diagnosis software for most modern computers, because hardware manufacturers have designed their products for use with Windows. The reason these hardware manufacturers build their products to fit Microsoft's systems is obvious: Microsoft holds a nearly complete worldwide monopoly on desktop PCs. (We do require recipients to remove unlicensed installations, and use their own legally licensed software on their computers.)
There are many reasons to be concerned about the Microsoft monopoly, but the one that concerns me is the agreement between Microsoft and Intel (and other hardware manufacturers) that has led to the explosive increase in the size of new software. This increase means premature obsolescence and waste of perfectly good equipment. Newer Microsoft products can't be used at all on older computers, meaning that colossal resources become hazardous waste.
The basic tasks we do with computers – typing documents, working with spreadsheets, even browsing the Internet – have not changed much. These jobs are not hard to do with a PC built in 1988. (Well, there was no Internet then.) There were different products for different types of work, and a wide range of choices, including some excellent non-Microsoft software. We can't use these products today, partly because they produce files that are incompatible with Microsoft products, but mostly because we have become so accustomed to the Windows display that we have great difficulty working with the old text screen. Can we ever return to that period of choice and efficient use of equipment without giving up a Windows-style screen?
You may have heard about the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft products. Linux is based on smaller, more efficient programming methods than Windows, and more consistent methods of handling hardware. It is faster and more reliable than Windows.
Linux is a UNIX operating system, based on engineering computers of the 80's and 90's. It is very solid and reliable and can run a great deal of Internet and entertainment software as well as engineering graphics software, using its X11 (“X-windows”) graphic environment. Much of this software is free from the Internet, because a tradition of sharing university-written software on the Internet has become a large peculiar software industry. These are known as “open source” products, in which the engineers who create a product share its “source code” (recipe) with other engineers. Everyone working with these products fixes problems, making the quality much higher than commercial products such as Microsoft's. In this new world, engineers are paid to put this software to work, not to create it as a competitive product: a new way of thinking about software.
Open source software is an answer to the premature obsolescence of all those early Pentium PCs, if it can be put to work in the office and in the home. That is still a big “if.” Open source software was created largely by and for engineers, and until recently was confusing and difficult to use for average computer users accustomed to Microsoft or Apple products. However, there have been great improvements in the past few years towards offering nearly all the features of Windows and MacOS in an X11 based desktop.
So is it time for Linux to run on these older PCs, in the offices and in the homes of average users? Perhaps. Word processing software for UNIX has never been strong, and the few good word processors available (such as Applix and WordPerfect) were large expensive commercial packages intended for business customers. Also, most were not compatible with Microsoft Word, which has become a de facto standard. Spreadsheet and personal productivity software has not received much attention in UNIX either, and is usually incompatible with Microsoft.
This is changing rapidly in the open source industry. Email software, especially web browsers such as Netscape, offer all the functionality of a Windows-based email program. There are now several open source word processing packages that are able to do much of the work of Word, and can produce files that are mostly compatible with Word – usually in Rich Text Format (RTF). Compatibility in the other direction – editing files produced in Word with a Linux word processor – is much more difficult, and that is often what's needed when opening a document received as an email attachment. Spreadsheets can be exported in CSV form from Microsoft Excel for use in any of the dozen or so open-source spreadsheet programs available in Linux. Personal productivity tools, including PDA support, are becoming stronger. Linux is close to ready for use in secondary schools as a standard desktop system. There are also many open source programs for graphics and entertainment, so it's not hard to imagine Linux in a home computer.
But it's not yet for everyone. Installation and maintenance tools, and word processor and other desktop software need to be simplified and made more foolproof and Microsoft-compatible. The way to help this happen is to use it and see how it can be improved – and get others interested in making these improvements.
TecsChange’s International Committee supports the adoption and use of Linux in Latin America and Africa – where foreign language support in all software is necessary. Fortunately, Linux is very well supplied with good foreign language support, because much of the software was created by programmers in Europe and Latin America.
We have set up two public-access Linux machines at TecsChange, with different Linux distributions (from different companies), so users can get the feel of these user interfaces and use familiar software on them, such as the Netscape web browser. We are also installing the best available Microsoft-compatible word processing and other desktop software, and we hope that you, our public access users, will give them a test spin to see if they suit your needs. We are holding Linux workshops starting in November, and a brief demonstration and discussion of Linux (including Microsoft vs. open source) will be added to our classes.
Welcome to this new software world! Please let us know what you think. And if you are already part of the Linux world and want to bring your skills and knowledge to TecsChange, feel free to contact me at abrown@msg.com.
(This article was written on a 1996 NEC Versa laptop with 133MHz processor, 48MB of memory, 850MB hard drive, running RedHat Linux 6.1, using “Ted”, an RTF word processor available for free at http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted.)