Part 2: Common Questions and Answers Is Linux really free?
Many of you might have seen
SuSE Linux CDs on sale in shops. But I said that Linux is free. How can both be true?
Well, first of all:
Linux is free. But not all Software that comes with it is free too and neither is the support. While you can buy SuSE Linux in shops, what you are actually paying for is the packaged software and the support for your system. You could, if you chose, download the actual Operating system from the
Novell website (Novell being the company making SuSE) for free and completely legally - but it included less software and you couldn't get their support.
Actually, most Linux distributions (a distribution is a certain "version" of Linux - I'll explain further later) are free and so is a lot of software for Linux.
Isn't Linux difficult to install?
I admit, it can be. But only if you choose to make it complicated. Most modern distributions have nice graphical installation routines, that allow you to install your new
OS without caring about partitions, devices, DHCP and so on. Examples on how to install some distributions can be found in the "Introduction to..." articles mentioned later in this article.
Will I have to go without Windows™?
Short answer: No!
Long answer: There are various options you have. You can install your Linux
instead of Windows,
next to Windows or even
within Windows. How does that work?
- Installing it instead of Windows is easy to understand: Delete Windows, install Linux.
- Installing it side by side with Windows is also easy to understand. Maybe you have had two versions of Windows installed at the same time? In that case, you had a small menu while start-up, asking you which Windows you want to boot. This is similar: You will have a boot manager (normally GRUB or LILO) which offers you the choice of loading Windows or Linux - or one of many Windows' or many Linuxes.
If you want to install Linux and Windows side by side, you may want to check this website which gives you a tutorial on how to do exactly that. - Installing Linux inside Windows might be the most difficult concept to understand, but it gives you most freedom of all. Actually what you do is this: You install a Virtual Machine, which emulates the existence of a further Computer. On this virtual computer, you can install a Linux or Unix or even another Windows or different system.
More about this later.
There's a further option: LiveCDs. A LiveCD (or LiveDVD) is a disc, which you put in your computers drive and tell it to boot from that disc. Then a fully functional System will load from disc, work as long as it's not switched of and when you do restart the computer without that disc, everything will be back to normal.
What about my files from Windows?
Linux is able to read and write to FAT32 and NTFS drives, so any drives you used under Windows can be used under Linux. However, when you reformat a drive, you might want to consider using a different file system.
Instructions on how to access partitions under Linux can be found
here.
And how about my Windows Software?
That is difficult to answer. While a lot of Windows software can be run with
WINE,
CrossOver and
Cedega, there is software that you just can't run under Linux (yet). However, you can almost always find a replacement or run it in a virtual machine with Windows. Oh, a note for the gamers: You can run many modern games in Linux too!
Are there good alternatives for my Windows Software?
There is some very good software available for Linux - and most of it is free too! For example, you can get the
Firefox Browser to surf the internet, the
OpenOffice suite, which can read, edit and create all of the MS Office formats plus many more and you can use
The GIMP for editing your photos. But these are just three of many thousands and thousands of programs you can have on your Linux system.
And what about my hardware?
Most Hardware is no problem in Linux, especially old hardware. Some new hardware (graphic cards, printers, TV cards) can be problematic. The reason for this is, that hardware producers often just don't write drivers for Linux but only for Windows and sometimes for Mac OS X. But these won't work under Linux, so some Linux users (who aren't paid for this work!) have to try to implement drivers for their favourite system. This takes time. But the more Linux users exist, the more companies will produce Linux drivers.
Where do I go for help?
As I said earlier, some distributions like SuSE offered versions of their system with support, but you had to pay for it. The much more common approach is this:
There are great on-line communities for the various distributions and within these communities, everyone tries to help everyone else. (Quite similar to this forum here!) Also, you will learn to love search engines like
Google, as these can help you find the answer to many problems that could occur.
Will I have to type commands all the time?
For a long time, Linux and Unix were completely command line driven. A lot of people didn't like that, so they started developing graphical interfaces. In 1998 a piece of software was released, that made a big change to the Linux world.
It was called the Kool Desktop Environment, later renamed to
K Desktop Environment (KDE). This piece of software "seek[ed] to fill the need for an easy to use desktop [...] similar to [...] MacOS™ or Window95/NT™". And from this point onwards, distributions like SuSE were developed using this new technology. Linuxes became much more user friendly.
Nowadays, there are quite a few
Desktop Environments, KDE still being one of the two most popular ones and the other one being
GNOME. And in most modern distributions, most tasks can be done within the graphical environment. You should still learn to use the shell, but not immediately.
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