Ed Hurst is Associate Editor Emeritus of Open for Business. Born in 1956, Ed has spent his entire adult life in the Gospel Ministry. However, that seldom paid the bills, so he took a large variety of secular jobs. Aside from a stint in the US Army Military Police and another in Field Artillery, Ed has worked in the trucking industry, public education, agriculture, and numerous semi-skilled jobs. As a disabled veteran, he is now semi-retired and pursues a ministry offering computer assistance to elderly folks in his area, and leads a house church. Currently residing in Choctaw, OK, he’s been married to Veloyce since 1978 and has two adult children.
As a writer, the only reason I ever got that first computer was
because it was far more efficient than a typewriter, and certainly more
readable than my own handwriting. The sheer volume of what I've turned
out over the years would be impossible for me to manage on paper. Add to
that all the stuff written by others that I wanted to save, and it
boggles the mind. Still, most of what I've written is read by others on
paper. That means I have to translate my electronic files into readable
paper copies. That first computer would have been nearly useless to me
without the attached printer.
Over the past two years or so, Tim Butler and I have discussed GNOME quite a bit. He likes the current trend, and I don't. Tim's article,
"Why GNOME's Got It Right" was partly stirred by the
Slashdot article but also by our discussion.
FreeBSD is very much a source-based system. The operating assumption
of the architects of FreeBSD is that you will compile most things from
the source code. The system is designed to work that way, and does it
exceptionally well. The famous "Ports Collection" is rather
unique in making a large number of packages available ready to build
and seldom requires anything but a few commands in a terminal window.
Having tried to build specialized applications on several different
versions of Open Source operating systems, I can assure you that
compiling on FreeBSD is about as easy as it gets.
How does one write a review of a project like this, without
reviewing the software that's included? Since all the software on the
CD has been reviewed repeatedly in other places, there's not much to
gain by doing it one more time. In this case, it is the concept itself
that needs a little more attention from the world.
In this lesson, we discuss more about stability issues. A popular buzzword these days is "interface". That's just
a fancy word implying that two or more people are face to face. In
actual practice, it usually means anything
but face to face.
It's a means of interacting with another. You are said to
"interface" by some means. So it is with computers.
So far, we have discussed how Open Source technology is more secure
because of how files are handled. Now we will examine stability
issues.
In previous articles, I've focused on helping users of older
hardware get the most from it. While most of the FOSS world uses one of
the two major desktop interfaces -- KDE or Gnome -- there are plenty of
folks using interfaces that are less resource hungry. While it's
important to note here that hogging resources is what one pays for all
the nifty automatic features found in KDE or Gnome, in reality there are
few other compelling reasons to use either. While XFce is a much lighter
competitor for them, the latest version (4.x) disappoints me with its
lack of a sound module.
There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually
making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon
reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to
setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it
is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our
assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so
we'll stick with the console login for now.
As Ed Hurst continues his
Clueless Computer User's Guide to Open Source, Ed explains something very important everyone should know about GNU/Linux and UNIX: where your files go in those systems. While all of the differences may seem confusing at first, Ed lays them out in an easy to understand fashion so that you can start using Free Software operating systems productively quickly.
In this first article of Ed Hurst's
Clueless Computer User's Guide to Open Source, Ed explores permissions and other basics of a multiuser system. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts or do not know why even a single user system should have multi-user principles applied to it, read on to find out.