Linux

 October 19, 2001

Today, an ex-student was back at my school during a non-mandatory laboratory that occurs every Friday. He was speaking about what he does in high school he is attending. The topic was about the IT subjects and how they are handled in that specific high school.

After the lecture, the ex-student stuck around to speak with the professor since the ex-student was trying to convince the teacher to ditch Windows and its licenses to move to a different OS, which was better and free. The teacher was not very convinced on the idea since, even if there was an obvious economic advantage in the choice, the teacher believed that it was not easy to use and that it would not have taught the students to use Windows, which is what is required by today and tomorrow people. After the conversation with the teacher, I approached the ex-student to learn more about this unusual operating system.

He explained to me that this was a Linux distribution, more specifically Knoppix.

From what I understood, some people are volunteering their time to create the code, which is free to use and share, and other people build this code with various names based on the goal.

The ex-student showed me a few things, mainly a “terminal”. I really appreciated the fact that it is possible to perform all operations from a DOS-like interface since this means that it’s possible to optimize the usage of all relevant commands are remembered. I think this is a very interesting feature, and I really dislike the fact that Windows is trying to move as far as possible from DOS.

The community-driven and Microsoft-free aspects of this are very interesting, in my opinion.

There are many aspects of Linux which are not clear to me, and I’ll try to learn as much about it as possible.