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My company is interested in developing a specialist application around a free software operating system such as Linux or FreeBSD, used as an embedded platform. The problem I
have with Linux is that -as I understand it -the licensing agreement demands that any application that is part of the system must also be supplied as source code. It would be out of the question for my company to sign up to something like this, as we are always careful to keep our proprietary algorithms secret.The licences for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are very different. The FreeBSD licence is very loose and basically just insists on the copyright notice being maintained. The GNU licence is stricter (or freer, depending on your point of view), its main aim being to ensure that work contributed by volunteers isn't hijacked by commercial organisations distributing closed source software for profit.
However, whether the GNU Public Licence (GPL) applies to your own changes to GNU/Linux will depend on what you mean by 'part of the system'. If it's just something you're using in-house you can do what you like with it. If you're distributing a complete Linux system commercially, or offering software commercially that runs on Linux, any software of yours that incorporates GNU code will also have to be open.
Note that this doesn't apply to code that only uses existing GNU sharable libraries, most of which are now covered by a less strict licence (the Lesser GPL, or LGPL). And, of course, it's allowable to include independent software applications under the terms of your own licence in the way that Word Perfect, for example, is distributed with Linux.
Two houses both alike in dignity, but with very different licensing terms and philosophies. The home of the GNU (GNU's Not Unix's) project is www.gnu.org and www.freebsd.org is the site of the closest free software competitor to Linux.
To your knowledge is there anywhere I can get a CD-ROM with an iso image for Slackware Linux for free or low cost, I know this is a regular question but your help would be welcomed.
We're not quite clear whether you're asking for a site where you can download an iso image, or whether you want a ready-cut CD. So we'll just answer both questions.
The site we always recommend for ready-made CDs of all sorts is www.linuxemporium.co.uk. It's run by john Waiters, who started it as a service to Linux users, and first popped up in this column early in 1998. Since then we've heard nothing but good from readers about the service john offers, so we're able to recommend the Emporium wholeheartedly. It specialises in cheap Linux CDs that cost £2.50 to £5 each, but also sells official boxed sets, as well as some versions of FreeBSD. We see john is offering the Cheapbytes Slackware 7.1 3 CD set for £7.50 plus postage (£1.50 for up to four CDs).
Lucky Internet users with a fast connection (or unlimited patience) and a CD burner can head for www.linuxiso.org and choose from a selection of more than a dozen iso images of current popular and less well-known Linux distributions, as well as NetBSD and FreeBSD. The site also includes a very useful comparison for beginners between five of the major Linux distributions (but curiously omitting SuSE). See also this month's Linux group test.
I am an experienced PC user but a Linux newbie. I am considering buying a copy of Linux RedHat 6.1 after using a friend's copy of Caldera Open Linux 2.2 for a month, and I was wondering if you could help me out with a couple of questions.
I am having difficulty finding a 56.6K modem, which works with Linux. I know they exist, but it's difficult to know which ones are supported, and none of the manufacturers I tried have drivers... surprise, surprise!
Also, I have a Creative Labs 3D Banshee Blaster card. According to the Web sites, there are drivers from 3Dfx available, but the instructions are very confusing and I don't know anything about how to use Linux like that (yet).
You will pretty quickly learn that the answer to almost any Linux problem is available on the Web. A search for the expression HOWTO (all one word in capitals) will quickly show you lots of sites that explain what to do.
In the case of 56K modems (provided that they are not software driven, PCI cards, or USB connected modems) there should not be any real difficulty: command sets are pretty standardised now, and few modems need anything other than the standard commands to connect at their maximum speed automatically. Details on setting them up can be found at www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/ModemHOWTO.html
Unfortunately, those caveats (particularly the bit about software modems) rule out about 75 percent of the modems on the market now! See the HOWTO for details.
Beware of cheap modems, particularly if they are PCI cards, or modems included in systems, as nowadays, these are almost always software driven, the so-called 'winmodems'. Strictly speaking, Winmodem is a trademark of 3Com/US Robotics and alternatives will often state 'for use on Pentium or better computers only', state that they are for use under Windows only, or have names which include the letters HCF (Host Controlled Family), HSP (Host Signal Processor) or HSF. While a few software modems now have Linux drivers, most still don't. For latest information, visit
www.idir.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html which collects notes on modem compatibility. Other terms to avoid (indicating that some modem functions are done by software) are MWAVE, DSP and RPI (Rockwell Protocol Interface). The RPI modems will work, but only if you disable error correction and compression.Currently no PCI modems will work, because the kerne12.2 serial drivers don't handle serial port devices on PCI cards though later kernels should support PCI devices (provided they are not software driven) properly.
For slightly more esoteric devices, it pays to be cautious. Linux device driver support will lag behind a bit. Not knowing how to instal13Dfx drivers will be the least of your problems as Linux is inherently a command line non-graphical environment. You will need a X.Windows implementation. Fortunately, most new Linux releases include one or other of the various alternatives available.
Leading contenders are KDE and Gnome RedHat used to provide Gnome, but now 6.1 includes both, leaving it to the end-user to choose between them! Deciding which is better is like asking whether a PC is better than a Mac -some users prefer one while other uses have strong opinions for the other. To put it simply, KDE is more polished, looks more like Windows and is more stable, but Gnome has architectural advantages that, when it is more stable, may make it the better choice in the long run.
If you are going to be put off by small difficulties like this, perhaps Linux is not for you! I only use Linux for servers, never desktop computers. If you don't want to know what goes on 'under the bonnet', stick to Windows - or, better yet, buy a Mac!
Due to its renowned reliability and speed I am very interested in trying out Linux. I'd like to do this without going the whole hog and dumping my hard-won Microsoft Windows operating system and related files. Is there any way to set up a Linux operating system and software 'within' Windows? Or is a dual-boot system the best bet, and how easy is this to achieve? Which is the best version of Linux (I've seen a number advertised) and where should I go to obtain it? Will l still be able to use my printer and scanner from within Linux or are there likely to be compatibility issues?
There are a number of distributions of Linux that can run from within your Windows partition, with one of the most popular being Phat Linux (www.phatlinux.com). Installation of the latest version (3.3) is extremely easy and involves either downloading and extracting a 242Mb Zip file (earlier versions range in size from 40Mb to 180Mb) to your hard drive or, if you don't fancy the download time, purchasing the boxed version of the product for $27 from the website. After a reboot, Phat Linux can be run from within the folder with no effect on your Windows installation.
Another option is to opt for a dual-boot (Windows and Linux) system, which wouldn't mean dumping your existing Windows installation. If you feel up to configuring a dual-boot system, you might like to install another hard drive, which would keep things tidy between the two operating systems. As a final point, it is impossible to say which Linux distribution is best - it is entirely up to an individual's personal taste. However, as long as you use the most up-to-date version of your chosen distribution, compatibility issues with any hardware shouldn't be a problem. Printers are widely supported under Linux, although support for scanners may be more difficult to resolve.
I recently installed a peer-to-peer network between my RedHat 6.1 system and another machine. (Inserted network card and reinstalled RedHat 6.1 for disk reasons) Before, I could connect to the Net fine. Now that I have a network as well. I can connect using kppp, or pppd and the connection is shown under ifconfig. However. I can't receive packets back when I send packets to certain ports. I can ping my server and receive packets back. I can telnet my server and receive packets, but I can't telnet my mail server (Port 110) or browse the web (Port 80 or 8080?) I am not running a proxy server. The packets get sent and appear on the graph of Details for kppp but only packets for the successful things I have mentioned appear for 'in' but under 1kb/s. I have a 56kflex modem that is working (Windows 95) and was working under Linux with very good speeds. The server settings are correctly configured as they always were.
It looks as if either IPMasquerading or IPForwarding are not enabled. You need to make sure the machine that is not connected to the Internet has its default route set as the internal IP of the machine which manages the dial-up connection. All other configuration needs to be performed on the machine with the modem attached, known in this instance as the gateway. Check that you have IPMasquerading compiled into the kernel. If you don't, then you will have to rebuild the kernel with that option enabled (it's under Networking Options) You'll also have to grab yourself the latest release of ipchains from either freshmeat.net or from your distributions ftp server. Once that is done, you need to do
echo 1 >
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip forward
ipchains -P forward -j
DENY
Ipchains -A forward -s
10.0.0.0/8 -d 0/0 0 -j MASQ
This assumes that you are using a 10.x.x.x address internally. Change it to 192.168.00/16 if you are using an IP in that range instead. You should find that everything will work okay, although if you want to use proper ftp, you'll need to compile and 'modprobe' the various additions kernel modules, such as ip_masq_ftp for the connection tracking capabilities You don't need to set up any other software, unless you find yourself in need of a web cache, and if this is the case, SQUID will be able to provide you with an excellent tool that is suitable for the job
I installed Mandrake Linux 7.0 off your May 2000 Superdisc. But, I find Linux is slow compared to Windows when running on the same PC. I have both booted on a Pentium 200 with 164mb of Ram. Windows and Linux share a 4.3GB Hdd.
I know my PC isn't the most up to date in the world, but I was disappointed by the speed of Linux compared to Windows. For instance, I loaded Star Office 5.2 from the August Superdisc. It installed fine, but when I launch the application it takes over a minute and a half to fire up. My question is this: are there any ways of tweaking Linux for the best performance? Or does it just look after itself?
Many people say that Linux is a lot slower than Windows 9x after installation, simply because they don't know what else is running. If you boot up the machine, login as root and run ps ax you will probably find a ton of processes for things such as Apache, which you don't need to run. You can either remove their entry using a runlevel editor such as LinuxConf, or 'rpm -e apache'. If you don't know what a particular process is, don't remove it. It's wise to build a customised kernel for your individual machine architecture, in your case 586. Most distributions have various kernels and automatically install the right one. There may be other features which you don't need within the kernel. Star Office is a fairly massive program, partially because it is a single binary, so it does take it a very long time to load. Check to make sure that Linux has plenty of spare swap space. It won't make Star Office run any slower, but it will give it room to swap out stuff you're not using.
Star Office is by no means a great example of a Linux application. If you run another program, such as the Gimp, you'll find it loads up far quicker and responds much more smoothly. Star Office was ported from Windows and took along a lot of bloat at the same time.
I have the Corel Linux distribution. My video card is a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. It has been successfully configured using the XF86Setup utility. However, it does not display colours properly. It does not matter what colour depth is set in control centre, all of the pictures are displayed with no more than 256 colours.
You will firstly want to check /etc/Xl1/XF86Config to see if it's actually set up to use something other than 8bpp. There should be a line similar to: DefaultColorDepth 16 within the Display section, usually near the bottom of the XF86Config file. If it lacks that, then it will automatically use 8bpp. You can just add that into XF86Config using whichever text editor you like, then restart X. You can check what colour depth X is currently running by using the 'xdpyinfo' program
Xdpyinfo | grep depths
You will be returned one or more lines with the current colour depth 8bpp is 256 colours, so if it returns
Depths (1): 8
Then X is not configured properly. As the Diamond Stealth 3D uses the XF86_SVGA X server, it may be that your card is not capable of doing more than 8bpp under X, in which case you may have to use something such as Accelerated X (www.xi.org), or check up on a new version of X.
If, at the end of the day, it still doesn't do what you want it to, the only option is to swap it out for a video chipset with better support.
For some time I have been keen on getting to know Linux, and I have recently installed the Corel version on my laptop as a dual boot. I use an external hard-drive through a PCMCIA card, which works fine through Windows 98 (and previously Win95). I simply slide it in and the system can recognise it.
However, in Linux, I can't figure out how to install my external HDD through the PCMCIA port, as the system doesn't pick it up automatically. How should I go about setting this up? Incidentally, I originally stopped using the dual boot, as it seemed to slow the system down a great deal, but am now trying out the system commander on your CD. However after choosing to boot into Linux, it then goes to the LILO option. Is there anyway to get rid of LILO so that it only uses the System Commander menu?
Most PCMCIA CD-ROM drives are ATAPI and have a IDE interface on the card. Almost every Linux distribution will support IDE on PCMCIA, so you may want to try it out with something other than Corel. Corel isn't the most appropriate distribution on a laptop. Something like RedHat, Mandrake or SuSE is a bit cleaner. If it still doesn't want to pick it up, it may be worth copying the CD to the Windows part of the disc, then installing from there, so you can set up PCMCIA properly later on.
As for System Commander, you can set up LlLO so that it doesn't display a prompt by removing the 'prompt' line from lilo.conf and running /sbin/lilo as root. It's always nice to have the flexibility to boot multiple kernels easily, so LlLO is quite handy to keep around.
I wondered whether some of the software drivers for Win modems were now stable enough to do a piece in the mag on how to get a Win modem working under Linux. I think that I've found a manufacturer's patch for mine and don't know what to do with it. Following the press articles, it seemed that whilst Linux are going to be here for a while, especially if low-cost consumer boxes catch on. At the moment, my manufacturer is only supporting OEMs, but it looks like the software at least is available.
It greatly depends upon the chipset used. Lucent have binary only drivers available for their chips, they don't always work and aren't particularly stable with more recent 2.2 kernels. There are also unofficial PCTel drivers, although they don't actually do very much at the moment. While they may work, to some extent, if you rely on the modem for anything, you will probably be better off getting a hardware based one. Even when they are working, software modems are never as reliable as the real thing.
Unix Word
OK, I must admit that your Unix column persuaded me that Linux will make a great way to get started with a Unix-like operating system. But there are Windows applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel that I have to run for business reasons. Please don't tell me that Star Office is just as good. I need the real McCoy.
We've discussed ways of running Windows applications under Linux in the column. For several years now our columnist Chris Bidmead has been using Windows Terminal Server with Citrix Metaframe to deliver Windows NT applications across a LAN to his Linux workstations (www.citrix.com). A free software alternative worth looking at is VNC (www.uk.research.att.com/software.html). A Windows application environment called Wine (www.winehq.com) is supplied with most Linux distros unfortunately it will only run a limited subset ofWin9x applications. Butjoakim Pietras (joakim@piman.demon.co.uk) has written in to recommend something new that might fit the bill. Trelos (www.trelos.com) offers a commercial product called Win4Lin that claims to be able to run any Windows 9x application that doesn't depend on sound or DirectX. We had some trouble installing it -you need a patched version of the kernel (supplied by Trelos, or patch your own) and the first Win4Lin release sent for review didn't work with non-US versions of Windows 98, but it's running well now on Chris' Mandrake 7 system. Over to Chris though for the final assessment: 'All I need to do now is find a use for it. These days there aren't any Windows applications I want to run and the idea of having to mess with entities with names such as "drive C:" sends shivers down my spine.