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BACKGROUND: Back in August of 1991, a student from Finland began a post to the comp.os.minix newsgroup with the words: Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, wont be a big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. The student was Linux Torvalds, and the hobby he spoke of eventually became what we know today as Linux. A full-featured POSIX-compliant operating system, Linux has been developed not just by Linux, but by hundreds of programmers around the world. The interesting thing about this is that this massive, world-wide development effort is largely uncoordinated. Sure, Linux calls the shots where the kernel is concerned, but Linux is more than just teh kernel. There's no management infastructure; A student in Russia gets a new motherboard, and writes a driver to support a neat feature the motherboard has. A system administrator in Maryland needs backup software, writes it, and gives it away to anyone that needs it. The right things just seem to happen at the right time. Another interesting thing is that Linux can be obtained for absolutely no money. That's right, most of the software is available (at no charge) to anyone with the time and inclinaton to download it. WHY NOT ANOTHER FLAVOR OF UNIX: Well this question is asked quite often, it is true that you can easily install certain programs on other unix distributions, such as; FreeBSD, SunOS, Irix, Aix etc.... But looking at the hackers perspective, my perspective, it seems that linux is by far the smartest choice, the reason being that nearly all new hacking software; remote exploits, stealth scanners, security scanners etc... Are nearly all ported for linux, and therefore will not be able to compile on your friendly ISP's shell :-) I have also found that linux is a lot easier to setup, and install than other unix distributions, linux also seems to be built more for regular systems instead of massive sparc, or Alpha workstations. WHICH DISTRIBUTION OF LINUX TO CHOOSE: Well this all depends on weather or not you have ever installed a unix operating system before, if you have installed a unix based O/S before and you consider yourself pretty skilled in unix then i can only recommend Slackware with a modified kernel to suit your needs, but really it's all up to you. For those people who have never installed Linux or any Unix O/S, then if i were you i would install RedHat; yes i know theres all those little minded k-rad elites out there now shaking their heads, but think about it would you as a Linux newbie rather be stuck with an extremely advanced installation, or have a program do everything for you. But newbies dont think you're stuck with this distribution forever, as soon as you're comfortable with RedHat Linux, then move onto something like Debian or Slackware. HOW DOES LINUX HELP ME BECOME AN ELITE HACKER: Well newbies sorry to burst your bubble, Linux dosnt help you worth a crap to become elite, you actually have to put in an effort and study the linux operating system upclose. You will have t experiemtn and twiddle with files, you will probably be used to seeing the Redhat installation procedure a couple of times a month, at those times when you tweeked too much with a file and ooops, erased something you shouldn't but as the wisest tell us we supposidly learn by our mistakes (yeah right when they lock you up for electronic fraud, you're gonna learn, I don't think so) However sitting as root on a linux box and getting a good inside view is what it's all about, this way you actually get to see and notice what a sysadmin goes through, you could for instance see what kind of logs he has running by looking at your own configuration or see if he runs any dialup scripts, if so which oens what are the passwords? And then offcourse if you use Linux all the time every day 24 hours a day 8 days a week 666 weeks a year and so no and so forth, then you will also get sued to the way a unix based system is built and structured and be a hell of a lot more safe while hacking some system. SO WHATS SO GOOD ABOUT LINUX WHEN COMPARED TO MICRO$HIT 95/98 OR NT: Linux is a lot mroe accelerated you get a much faster performance than with any windows machine. All software (nearly) is free, you will always find people who use linux extremely helpful because thats the whole Linux attitude, as explained in the background information on linux the whole basis for GNU and Linux free software is because of people writing programs as they ened them, and then freely distributing programs on the net, however this whole thing is being corrupted by those bigass cmpanies, that have software out in Winblows and get mroe greedy and have to spoil the whole linux attitude, by offering their winblows version of software ported to linux at a cheap price such as $20, which i never end up paying, because i can normally find a much better software package for free. WILL I BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE INTERNET WITH LINUX: In mostc ases you will, there are certain cases where you may not be able to because of the make of your modem. Cases such as these, are when users have modems that require windows software to run to compress data for the modem etc... obviously this will not work, any winmodems also are not compatible with linux, because it's not a true 56K(53.3K) modem, it again uses some kind of software to compress the data or whatever it may do, also U.S robotics modems cant be used in linux as far as i know. CAN I STILL HAVE WINDOWS ON MY COMPUTER: Yes when you install linux you will be prompted if you wish to install the industry standard boot loader (LILO) if yu answer yes you will have the option of which partitions to choose to boot from at startup. You will also be able to access your other partitions under Linux, all you have to do is mount the filesystems, this again shows why Linux is such a powerful tool, unlike windows it can access other types of filesystems. SHOULD I WORRY ABOUT HAVING ENOUGH SPACE ON MY LINUX PARTITION: As long as you have enough space to install the basic Linux system, space shouldn't be a problem, first of all you will find that most linux software is relatively small. Anotehr thing you can do is to mount your dos partition and create a folder called Linux, you can then access this folder under Linux and use it as part of your linux harddrive, install programs there etc... It's like having a whole new harddrive. WHAT ABOUT MY SOUND: Just because you install Linux dosnt mean you will have to loose your sound, however many suers dont bother with it, especially at such places as ISP's and other commercial operations. But incase you want sound on linux you should have the option to install the sound package, so good luck to you, sometimes it wont work sometimes it will. If your sound wont work then dont worry search for Linux Sound Drivers in any search engine and you should get pages and pages of downloads for specefic soundcards. HELP! I'M A GAMER AND I NEED TO PLAY GAMES: There are tons and tons of games for linux, whch are all free. And also many newer version of games, Quake I & II, Doom, Duke 3D etc...all have quake executables which can be downlaod for free then all you have to do is use all the other files from windows to run the game in linux. WRITERS NOTE: Well people hope you enjoyed this little text file, it wasnt very hacker oriented but will give you a nice insight into using linux for many purposes. This was written completely in linux using TclTextEdit which was downloaded 2 minnutes before i started to write (for free). I will soon be bringing you a text file with some nice linux toolz, until then keep your Linux boxes warm for Christmas :-) If you want more text files please tell me something to write about, and e-mail me comments and suggestions to ameister@vol.com . Also visit my webpage for other text files http://www.vol.com/~ameister . |