The Writers Perspective

Getting users to try Linux is only half the battle. The other half is showing them what they can achieve when using it. Linux Made Easy by Rickford Grant uses a task based approach to show how you can use Linux to perform your daily tasks; email, browsing, letter writing, even scanning and printing are covered in detail. I spoke to Rickford Grant about the book, why he chose Xandros and how the look and feel of the computing environment are more important to acceptance than the name on the box.

The book highlights how easy it is to do your everyday tasks – email, writing letters, scanning documents – using Linux. How key do you think this is to the wider adoption of Linux?

I can’t help but think that it is extremely important. Until now, the image of Linux has been of a system for people on the geekier side of the compu-user spectrum, and I’d say the majority of books out there on the subject bear this out with their focus on networks, commands, and so on.

One of the reasons I wrote my first book, ‘Linux for Non-Geeks,’ and now ‘Linux Made Easy,’ was that most of the Linux books out there are so focused on that more geekish facet of Linux that it was hard to imagine a mere mortal having any reason to use Linux, let alone being able to do so. They certainly had that effect on me when I first got started.
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Apache has been a stalwart of the Internet for some time. Not only is it well known as a web serving platform, but it also forms a key part of the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/Python/PHP) and is one of the best known open source projects. Getting an Apache installation right though can be tricky. In Pro Apache, Peter Wainwright hopes to help readers by using a task, rather than feature based, approach. I spoke to Peter about Apache, its supported platforms, the competition from IIS and his approach to writing such a mammoth tome.

Inflammatory questions first – Unix or Windows for Apache?

Unix. To be more precise, BSD, then Linux, then almost anything else (e.g., commercial Unixes), then Windows — if you must.

The usual technical arguments and security statistics against using Windows are readily available from a number of sources, so let me give a rather different perspective: it seems Microsoft was in discussion to buy Claria, creators of Gator (one of the more annoying strains of adware that infest Windows desktops). Coincidentally, Microsoft’s beta ‘AntiSpyware’ tool recently downgraded Claria’s products from quarantine to ignore. It seems that the deal fell through, but for reasons of bad PR rather than any concern for the customer. Call me cynical if you like, but I see little reason to place my faith in a closed-source operating system when the vendor is apparently willing to compromise the security of its customers for its own business purposes. Yes, plenty of us already knew that, but this is an example even non-technical business managers can grasp.
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GNU Emacs has been the editor of choice for many users for many years. Despite new operating systems, environments and applications, emacs still has a place in the toolbox for both new and old users. I talked to the authors of Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition: Eric S Raymond, Deb Cameron, Bill Rosenblatt, Marc Loy, and Jim Elliott about the emacs religion, nervous keyboard twitches and whether emacs has a future in an increasingly IDE driven world.

Well, I guess the answer to the age-old geek question of ‘emacs’ or ‘vi’ is pretty much covered with this book?

Jim Elliott (JJE): We pretty much start with the assumption that people picking up the book want to know about Emacs. I had fun following the flame wars for a while a decade ago, but we’ve moved on. Some of my best friends and brightest colleagues swear by vi.

Bill Rosenblatt (BR): I try not to get involved in theological arguments.

Deb Cameron (DC): Like all religious questions, you can only answer that for yourself.

Eric S. Raymond (ESR): Oh, I dunno. I think we sidestepped that argument rather neatly.

Marc Loy (ML): I think the other authors have chimed in here, but this book “preaches to the choir.” We don’t aim to answer that religious debate. We just want to help existing converts! Of course I think emacs! but I’m a bit biased.

Could you tell me how you (all) got into using emacs?

ESR: I go back to Gosling Emacs circa 1982 — it was distributed with the variant of 4.1BSD (yes, that was 4.*1*) we were using on our VAX. I was ready for it, having been a LISP-head from way back.
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Getting the best performance today relies on deploying high performance clusters, rather than single unit supercomputers. But building clusters can be expensive, but using Linux can be both a cheaper alternative and make it easy to develop and deploy software across the cluster. I interview Joseph D Sloan, author of High Performance Linux Clusters about what makes a cluster, how Linux cluster competes with Grid and proprietary solutions and how he got into clustering technology in the first place.

Clustering with Linux is a current hot topic – can you tell me a bit about how you got into the technology?

In graduate school in the 1980s I did a lot of computer intensive modeling. I can recall one simulation that required 8 days of CPU time on what was then a state-of-the art ($50K) workstation. So I’ve had a longtime interest in computer performance. In the early 1990s I shifted over to networking as my primary interest. Along the way I set up a networking laboratory. One day a student came in and asked about putting together a cluster. At that point I already had everything I needed. So I began building clusters.
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OpenLDAP is the directory server of choice if you want a completely free and open source solution to the directory server problem. Tom Jackiewicz is the author of Deploying OpenLDAP, a title that aims to dissolve many of the myths and cover the mechnanics of using OpenLDAP in your organization. I talked to him about his book, his job (managing OpenLDAP servers) and what he does when he isn’t working on an LDAP problem.

Could you summarize the main benefits of LDAP as a directory solution?

There are many solutions to every problem. Some solutions are obviously better than others and they are widely used for that reason. LDAP was just one solution for a directory implementation. Some people insist that Sony’s BetaMax was a better solution than VHS–unfortunately for them, it just didn’t catch on. The main benefit of using LDAP as a directory solution is the same reason people use VHS now. There might be something better out there but people haven’t heard of it, therefore it gets no support and defeats the idea of having a centralized directory solution in place. Bigger and better things out there might exist but if they stand alone and don’t play well with others, they just don’t fit into the overall goals of your environment.

If you deploy any of the LDAP implementations that exist today, you instantly have applications that can tie into your directory with ease. Because of this reason, what used to be a large scale integration project becomes something that can actually be accomplished. I’m way into standards. I guess LDAP was simple enough for everyone to implement and just caught on. If LDAP existed in the same form it does today but another directory solution was more accepted, maybe I’d be making arguments against using LDAP.

Please read the rest of the interview at LinuxPlanet.

Postfix is fast becoming a popular alternative to sendmail. Although it can be complex to configure, it’s easier to use Postfix with additional filtering applications, for example Spam and virus filters, than with some other mail transfer agents. I spoke to Patrick Koetter and Ralk Hildebrandt about The Book of Postfix, the complexities of configuring Postfix, Spam, and email security.

How does Postfix compare to sendmail and qmail?

Ralf Hildebrandt (RH): As opposed to sendmail, Postfix was built with security in mind.

As opposed to qmail, Postfix was built for real-life systems in mind that have to adapt to the hardships of the Internet today. qmail is effectively unmaintained.

Patrick Koetter (PK): That’s a tough question because I am not one of those postmasters who spent half their life working with Eric Allman’s Sendmail nor did I spent too much time enlarging my knowledge on qmail, so I can’t give you an in detail answer that will really tackle specific features or functionalities.

Let me give it a different spin and try if that answers it:
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PHP and MySQL are common solutions in many web development situations. However, when using them for e-commerce sites some different techniques should be employed to get the best out of the platforms. I talked to Cristian Darie and Mihai Bucica about their new book which uses an interesting approach to demonstrating the required techniques; the book builds an entire T-Shirt ordering shop.

Could you give me, in a nut shell, the main focus of the book?

When writing “Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce”, we had two big goals of equal importance in mind. The first goal was to teach the reader how to approach the development of a data-driven web application with PHP and MySQL. We met this goal by taking a case-study approach, and we did our best to mix new theory and practice of incremental complexity in each chapter.
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Subversion is having what can only be described as a subversive effect on the versioning software environment. CVS has long been the standard amongst programmers, but it has it’s faults and Subversion (read Sub-version) addresses those known and perceived about CVS. I talked to Garrett Rooney about his book Practical Subversion, his contributions to the Subversion code and where Subversion fits into the scheme of your administration and development environments.

I see from the book you are a strong believer in version control – can you summarize the main benefits of version control?

I like to think of version control as a way of communicating information between developers.

When you commit a change to a source tree you can think of it as an automated way of telling every other developer how they can fix the same problem in their source tree. The benefits go further though, since in addition to keeping everyone on the team up to date with the latest fixes, you’re also recording all of the history. This means that later on, when you want to figure out how a piece of code got the way it is you can look at the series of changes (and hopefully the justification for the changes, if you’ve been good about writing log messages) that let to the current situation. Looking at that history is often the best way to understand why the code got the way it is, which means you’re less likely to make the same mistake twice when making new changes.
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Knoppix is not just another Linux distribution. Unlike many Linux alternatives, Knoppix doesn’t need to be installed; everything runs from a CD (called a ‘Live CD’ distribution). While Live CDs aren’t unique to Knoppix, it is the way the Knoppix CD is packaged that makes the difference. Knoppix includes intelligent hardware detection – it can automatically identify nearly everything on your machine and then make the bet of it – and the CD includes a wide selection of programs, from typical Linux applications through to repair utilities and tools.

I talked to Kyle Rankin, author of Knoppix Hacks about how the book idea was formed, how he chose the contents and some of the things you can do with Knoppix.

OK – I can’t make up my mind whether I’ve fallen in love with Knoppix or the Knoppix Hacks book. What lead to the production of this book?

A friend of mine works at O’Reilly heard that they were looking for someone to do a Knoppix book for them. Not too long before he had seen me use Knoppix at an installfest to resize someone’s Windows partition and set up Debian in a relatively short amount of time. He approached me with the news and encouraged me to send them a book proposal. I had never written a book before, but I personally used Knoppix a lot, especially as a recovery tool. I thought a Hacks book applied to Knoppix was a great idea so I started jotting down ideas and submitted a formal proposal for the book that was accepted. Add months of furious writing and Knoppix Hacks was born. I started the book liking Knoppix and finished the book absolutely loving it.
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PHP is a popular web development/deployment platform and you can get even more out of the platform by using the extensions and tools available on the web to extend PHP’s capabilities. I talk to David Sklar, author of Essential PHP, about his new book and PHP development.

Why do you use PHP?

It’s proven itself to be a flexible and capable solution for building lots of web applications. I’m a big fan of the "use the right tool for the job" philosophy. PHP isn’t the right tool for every job, but when you need to build a dynamic web app, it’s hard to beat.

Could you tell me what guided your thoughts on the solutions you feature in the book?

They’re solutions to problems I’ve needed to solve. Code reuse is a wonderful thing and PEAR makes it easy. It’s a frustrating waste of time to write code that does boring stuff like populate form fields with appropriately escaped user input when you’re redisplaying a form because of an error. HTML_QuickForm does it for you. The Auth module transparently accomodates many different kinds of data stores for authentication information. One project might require a database, another an LDAP server. With PEAR Auth, the only difference between the two would be one or two lines of configuration for Auth.
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