Sunday, May 11, 2008


Tech Up


Guess I'm not going anywhere in the upcoming 3 weeks, nor am I joining in any happening activities, so I'm going to majorly overhaul my home network. As networking has always been another big gap in my knowledge, I have been reading up a bit... and behold all the amazing things I found out...


Linux
Linux is an open-source operating system around since 1991. I hope you didn't think "computer = windows" (or maybe macs). There are a dozen operating systems existing in this world and windows is just one of them. In fact, many commercial servers use non-windows operating systems because of their greater stability and security.

Linux is also open-source, meaning all the underlying source code can be freely modified, use, distributed by anyone (yes, including you if u knew how to), as opposed to proprietary software, like windows. Firefox is another open-source software if you didn't know. I shall leave the comparison of open-source and closed-source software to another day, but let me just quote wikipedia:

"A 2001 study of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that this distribution contained 30 million source lines of code. Using the Constructive Cost Model, the study estimated that this distribution required about eight thousand man-years of development time. According to the study, if all this software had been developed by conventional proprietary means, it would have cost about 1.08 billion dollars (year 2000 U.S. dollars) to develop in the United States."

Marvel at the power of open-source programming. Because of its open-sourced nature, Linux has a lot of versions, or "distributions", commonly abbreviated as "distros". Red Hat as mentioned in the article was quite popular in my secondary sch days. It has been discontinued since. Ubuntu is another popular distro currently. As I'm typing this, my download of Ubuntu (697mb) is finishing. (Yes, its completely free.) This also leads me to the next part of my post - Puppy Linux.


Puppy Linux
Puppy Linux is a distro focused on light-weight-ness and ease of use. The installation file is a mere 89mb and what's even more cool: it runs totally on RAM. For the uninitiated, who may be puzzled by this, RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and as opposed to hard disk space, RAM is wiped every time u shutdown your computer. That is why your computer only remembers whatever you have "saved" (to ur hard disk space) and everything else is forgotten when you turn off ur machine.

The windows OS is anchored to your hard disk space (15gb of it if you are using Windows Vista Home Basic). Yes there's nothing bad about that if you have the disk space to afford. But the cool thing about Puppy Linux is that it runs without any disk space! Which means I can pop a CD containing Puppy Linux on it, boot it up without going through any installation process, remove the CD, and Puppy Linux runs using 0.00mb of disk space! And that doesn't mean I have to have loads of RAM to run Puppy Linux. In fact, the official documents state that you only need 256mb of RAM to run it. And that is an overestimation. I ran it on my old laptop today with only 128mb of RAM and it was quite smooth.

Implications: I am able to walk around with my Puppy CD and boot the OS on almost *any* computer within minutes.

Of cos the main put-off of non-windows, or open-sourced operating systems in general is the unfriendly graphics user interface (GUI) (or in some OSs, the complete lack of). However, Puppy Linux was quite usable, albeit with some unfamiliar icons and program names. In my brief glance through, I noted a word processor, a paint-like program, web and email programs, FTP and HTTP servers and clients etc etc. Basically most of what you would expect on a minimal windows install. And they all use little system resources. (my laptop is blazing at a processor speed of 400MHz and 128 RAM)


Headless computing systems - VNC and SSH
Been to a server room before? Or seen one on the TV before? If you had, then you would noe what I'm talking about - those menacing, unfriendly looking metallic boxes without heads, or rather, monitors. Then how are you going to use them? The answer is simple: think "remote control".

Using things like VNC and SSH, you are able to use one computer to control another computer, hence the lack of need to have a monitor on the controllee. Its sort of like surfing the net. You are able to view a webpage that is stored on a magnetic platter few million kilometers away. Except that you can't do whatever you want to the webpage. You merely view it. Using protocols like SSH, you can use the other computer like... a computer. So cry no more when your laptop's screen gets irreversibly damaged. You still have (some) use for your dear lappy.

VNC stands for "virtual network computing", while SSH stands for "secure shell" and basically, they are the computer equivalents of remote controllers. Maybe u dun see why being able to "remote control" computers is cool... but I shall reveal all the potential of this in future posts.. if i succeed...


So wad's up?
As mentioned before, I shall be giving my home network a major overhaul during the short break. Main objectives will include making my wireless network more stable and giving it more functionality... details shall be revealed in upcoming posts... stay tuned..hehehe

posted by nwxiang at 9:16 PM |


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