Starting Right Now
Now that you have read a few pages, if you are impatient to get started, insert the DVD or CD that
comes with this book into the appropriate drive on your PC and reboot. When you see the boot
screen, press Enter. When the DVD or CD boots, the following happens, respectively:
KNOPPIX starts up. A fully functional KNOPPIX desktop Linux system will boot
directly from the DVD. From that Linux system, you can do everything you'd expect to
do from a modern desktop computing system: write documents, play music, communi-
cate over the Internet, work with images, and so on. If you have a wired Ethernet connec-
tion that connects to the Internet when you start up Windows, most likely it will also
connect automatically when KNOPPIX starts.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) starts up. This small, amazing desktop-oriented Linux sys-
tem starts up directly from the CD that comes with this book. Besides being expandable
and adaptable, DSL runs on everything from low-end PCs to powerful workstation hard-
ware while being small enough to fit on a mini CD (only about 50MB in size).
Now that you have seen some examples of what Linux can be, read on to see what Linux is and
where it came from.
Understanding Linux
People who don't know what Linux is sometimes ask me if it's a program that runs on Microsoft
Windows. When I tell them that Linux is, itself, an operating system like Windows and that they
can remove (or never purchase) Windows, I sometimes get a surprised reaction: "A PC can run
with nothing from Microsoft on it?" The answer is yes!
The next question about Linux is often: "How can Linux be free?" While the full answer to that is a
bit longer (and covered later), the short answer is: "Because the people who write the code license
it to be freely distributed." Keep in mind, however, that the critical issue relating to the word "free"
is "freedom," meaning that you are free to rebuild, reuse, reconfigure, and otherwise do what you
like with the code. The only major responsibility is that if you change the software, you pass it for-
ward so that others may benefit from your work as well.
Linux is a full-blown operating system that is a free clone of the powerful and stable UNIX operat-
ing system. Start your computer with Linux, and Linux takes care of the operation of your PC and
manages the following aspects of your computer:
Processor -- Because Linux can run many processes from many different users at the
same time (even with multiple CPUs on the same machine), Linux needs to be able to
manage those processes. The Linux scheduler sets the priorities for running tasks and
manages which processes run on which CPUs (if multiple processors are present). The
scheduler can be tuned differently for different types of Linux systems. If it's tuned
6
Linux First Steps
Part I
