Autonomous IT

Welcome back to the Hands on IT podcast. I'm your host, Landon Miles. And this month at Automox, we're diving into one of my all time favorite topics, Linux. It's a subject close to my heart, and I've been eager to share this with you all since the inception of this podcast. So in this podcast, we'll cover its fascinating history, its various use cases, and even share some insights from other content released by Automox over the past month that you may have missed.

So before we get ahead of ourselves, let's tackle the basics. What exactly is Linux? So Linux is an operating system like macOS or Windows. There are 2 main parts, and naturally, to limit the amount of confusion, both are commonly referred to as Linux. The two main parts of Linux are the Linux kernel and userspace, sometimes also called user land, but everyone knows that space is cooler, so userspace.

The kernel is the core element of the Linux operating system. It acts as a bridge between computer hardware and the applications running on the system. It manages system resources effectively, allowing software and hardware to communicate through its system calls. Developed originally by Linus Torvalds and first released in 1991, the kernel has evolved through open source contributions from developers around the world, making it highly customizable and efficient across various platforms. So the Linux kernel uses a modular approach, allowing functionality to be added or removed according to user needs.

Next is the Linux user space. So the user space is the environment where users directly interface with their computers and interact with them. So whether it's through the command line interface for server management or use with the graphical desktop environments for day to day tasks in a desktop environment, this layer sitting atop the Linux kernel functions as the intermediary, translating user commands and actions into instructions that the kernel can process and execute. So interestingly enough, many of us interact with Linux more often than we realize. For instance, Google's Chrome OS, which powers the increasingly popular Chromebooks found in schools, is based on the Linux kernel.

This means that for many kids today, their first introduction to a computer is through Linux. And it doesn't stop there. Android phones, Roku TVs, and even the technology driving web servers across the world are many times powered by Linux. Linux has also made its way to Mars, which is one of my favorite stories, with the Ingenuity helicopter. Linux is an integral part of our digital lives, often running quietly and reliably in the background whether we know it or not.

So my history with Linux. I started using Linux in about 2011. Now I've always been a serial tinkerer, and I've mentioned it before, but I love computers, and I've been playing them since about the time I could walk. So from Microsoft Paint on Windows 95 to everything in between today, I've played with it. I distinctly remember the first time my dad looked up something on the Internet.

It was 1996, and we just gotten back from a walk where we had seen several snakes that were sunbathing. We got home. My dad did a quick search on Ask Jeeves. This was pre Googled, and it turns out that they were copperheads. So it also confirmed that it was probably the right decision to turn around and not get any closer to the snakes.

Now nothing I've ever owned has been safe from a screwdriver. From taking apart toys to brand new guitars to the dash of my car. Anything I could learn from or thought I could learn from, I'd take apart. Now it took me a while to figure out how how to put it back together again, but that's another story. So I'd used Mac.

I'd used Windows, and I was curious to see what other alternatives were and wanted to play with my computer. I wanted to see what other problems I could solve. So to be honest, the journey started when I was in high school. I was flipping through channels back when we did that late one night, again, still in high school, and came across a clip from the Big Bang Theory, which I'll include the show notes below, where they were discussing Linux. Worth a Google, I thought, and then it took me down a much longer path than the 30 seconds I spent on that channel before flipping to the next one.

So laugh tracks and my questionable taste in TV shows as a high schooler aside, playing around with Linux led me to automating lab test equipment and creating some data logging software that I used in my job and then automating factory test equipment. Linux has almost always been a part of my professional life. So that's a brief version of my history with Linux and why I love it. So let's take a step back and look at the real history of Linux. So to understand the Linux origins, we need to journey back to the late 19 sixties at AT and T Bell Labs, where UNIX was born.

So UNIX introduced many revolutionary concepts that we take for granted today, like multi user or multitasking abilities, the ability to do more than one thing in a computer at once, record a podcast, look at my show notes. It's important. Hierarchical file systems with volumes that could be unmounted, that was included in UNIX, and the ability to initiate asynchronous processes. These features help to lay the groundwork for modern operating systems. Originally written entirely in assembly language, Unix was rewritten in c in the early 19 seventies, which promised compatibility and portability to other systems.

So UNIX was formally released in 1973 at the symposium on operating system principles. Sounds like a good time to me. It was released in a paper given by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who were 2 of the founding engineers of unit the UNIX operating system. So this paper is linked in the show notes below. It makes for a really interesting read to see what they thought was state of the art at the time and how we still use some of those principles today, again, linked in the show notes below.

So word of this innovation spread quickly. A fun piece of computer lore. So due to the outcome of a 19 fifties antitrust trial, Bell Systems, which was AT and T, could not enter into any business other than common carrier communication services, which is telecommunications or phones. Unix could not be turned into a product, but that didn't stop the request from coming in. Ken Thompson quietly began answering a request for more information about UNIX or how to get UNIX by shipping out tapes and disks of the source code, each accompanied with by legend according to legend, a note signed love kin.

Eventually, AT and T would sell UNIX for the cost of shipping. Because the company widely and inexpensively licensed UNIX by the early 19 eighties, thousands of people at AT and T and elsewhere were using UNIX. So as computer science students move from universities into companies, they wanted to continue using UNIX, and observers began to see UNIX as a potential universal operating system. It was suitable for all computers. Some reports in looking at the source code says that there was less than 20,000 lines of code, almost all in c, and that was what the UNIX kernel was at the time.

Then 1984 rolled around. So Bell Systems, AT and T divested its companies, and guess what? They could sell UNIX now. They no longer freely offer the source code, which began to fragment UNIX and caused a lot of incompatibilities. Something else quite important also happened in 1984.

A computer programmer named Larry Wall developed what he called the patch utility. So the patch program was a simple tool that applied code changes to a base file, meaning that Unix developers could cooperate by passing around patches rather than the entire code base. So that being said, on behalf of all of us at Automox, thanks, Larry. Also, potential future podcast guest if you wanna come on and you're listening to this, probably not, but hop on in. So comparative to today, the Internet and data transfer data would often install cleanly even if much of the base file had changed since the patcher had got the patch.

So back to UNIX. Despite its many innovations, UNIX was now not freely available. This led Linus Torvalds, who at the time was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki, to begin the development of a free alternative in the late 19 eighties. He had seen the benefits Unix gained from having its source code publicly available and then the detriment that had happened to it from being closed off. So driven by angst towards the expensive and restrictive nature of proprietary operating systems, our buddy and potential another potential future guest of the podcast, Linus Torvalds, set out to create what would eventually become the Linux kernel.

In 1991, he released an announcement on a free operating system that he had been working on, Linux. The announcement was made on Usenet, which if you're not familiar with Usenet, it's kind of like the grandparent or great grandparent to Reddit. And then since then, Linux has kept momentum. Now I have a friend in the Netherlands who calls it Linux. And now that I have a podcast, I can't let the opportunity go to give him a hard time.

So here is mister Torvalds himself.

Hello. This is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux.

The Linux kernel still remains in active development, and over the years, has had over 15,000 contributors in its 30 years of existence. The beauty of open source software is that anyone can work on it. So from companies like Microsoft or Texas Instruments, Red Hat and Canonical to, well, you. Linus Torvalds was 22 years old when he released the original Linux kernel. Now if you notice a bug or want to add a feature to the Linux kernel, you can.

Pending approval, of course, but you can. And if you wanna get started on that, we'll put a link in the show notes of how to get started on that. So another point of interest, fed up with managing the source code of the Linux kernel and the request of thousands of developers, Linus Torvalds needed a solution. His solution was to develop and create a way to manage code, which was Git. Now Git is used by GitHub and many other code management solutions.

So that's the brief history of Linux, but why and where is Linux used now? Other than most Linux distributions being free, one of the Linux's greatest strengths is its versatility. It can power anything from a laptop collecting dust in the attic or your company's e waste bin to sophisticated servers running the backbone of the Internet. So Linux reliability and efficiency means it requires fewer resources, making it an ideal choice for reviving older hardware. Linux is also known for its stability.

So if an update or software patch is applied, oftentimes, it can be done without rebooting. No one likes server downtime, and the ability to patch without rebooting is an important part of Linux's stability. So the way Linux manages processes and memory is also a little bit different than other operating systems. The Linux kernel is modular and kind of looks

at the background processes and can assign priorities to them,

making sure that the system stability is prioritized. So Linux also runs the web. Almost every major streaming platform uses Linux servers. Some figures state that 95% of the top million websites worldwide use Linux servers. It's everywhere.

So do you need to spin up a quick server in the cloud? Most likely, you'll be using Linux. Amazon Web Services has their own distribution, and strangely enough, Microsoft even has their own distribution of Linux, Azure Linux for their cloud. Microsoft even uses Linux for to run a lot of their cloud infrastructure. You know, it's the old, if you can't beat them, join them.

Need a local server for a database project or anything else? Many Linux distributions are free, and that's a great use for them. Linux's ability to be customizable and its stability make it a great choice for embedded systems. So unlike general purpose computers that can run a wide range of applications and processes, Embedded systems are designed for a particular application or part of an application. So from cars to in flight entertainment, Roku streaming sticks, industrial automation computers, audio mixers, IoT devices, we could go on and on, but Linux is used here, and it's a great solution for it.

Now if you wanna train an LLM or an AI model, Linux is your best bet, and it's kind of what's used broadly across that industry also. Linux is also fun fact, Linux is also extensively used in the film industry. So software like DaVinci Resolve and Blender were originally designed for Linux and often performed better on Linux than other operating systems. Titanic was the first major motion picture to be produced on Linux servers. So Pixar, DreamWorks, Industrial Light, and Magic, and Pinsar Pixar's render farm is said to be Linux based.

There's a whole lot of Linux, and its dependability, flexibility, and ease of customization make it great for just about every application you can pull it for. So we've talked a little bit, and I've mentioned briefly Linux distributions. So what is a Linux distribution? So imagine Linux as ice cream. So let's take this tasty trip together.

The kernel is the base for ice cream, so it's your milk, cream, and sugar. Then there are flavors like chocolate, vanilla, cookies, and cream representing the different distributions built on top of the kernel. Each distribution or distro offers a unique taste, but at its core, it's still ice cream. It still has milk, cream, and sugar. But they may have chocolate, may have other things built into that that kind of change the experience for the user or tailor it to what it needs to be tailored for.

So while the kernel remains rather unchanged, the user space is modified. So many companies have built business models around developing operating systems around the Linux kernel. So like Canonical or Red Hat or SUSE. Oftentimes, these the software, these operating systems are free to download, but they will offer paid support options. So that's where they make their money is they get into these enterprises where they can say, hey.

We can help support you if you pay us, but if not, it's free to use. And kind of like what happened with the UNIX in the eighties is that students or tinkerers or anyone else that wanted to use Linux, they wanted or wanted to use Unix back in the day could. And then when they get into a job, when they get into industry, they'll start to try to solve these problems and think, I know how to solve this with Linux. I know the easiest way to solve this is with Linux. And that's how a lot of these companies have built their business models.

Another interesting point is Linux servers and Linux desktops. So while Linux servers are the powerhouse behind many Internet services we use daily, Linux desktops are kind of like macOS or Windows where it's just a normal user friendly desktop. The main difference lies in the inclusion of the desktop environment, which shapes the user experience. So Linux desktop distributions include a desktop environment, which is commonly referred to as a DE. So a desktop environment is what you think about when you think about using a computer.

It's where you interact with everything, your mouse, your graphics, menus, icons. That's the desktop. So with Linux, there are always a lot of options. Common desktop environments include GNOME, Cinnamon, KDE, Plasma, Mate, and many others. Now for some reason, Linux also has a long and storied history of pronouncing words differently.

For example, Mate spelled the same as mate. GNOME is spelled the same as gnome, like a garden gnome, but it's Guh-Nome. I don't know why. There's probably someone that will tell you why, but they just like pronouncing things differently. So Linux server distributions typically do not have any desktop environment and are typically managed through the command line or a terminal.

Linux servers are dedicated towards stability and resource utilization. If it's quietly working away in the background, it doesn't need the resource drain of a desk desktop environment. So now whether you're a seasoned IT professional or a curious newcomer, exploring the various desktop environments in Linux distributions can help you understand the flexibility and power of Linux and help you understand how computers work a little bit better. So maybe I have sold you on Linux, and you're wondering where to start. Now if you're intrigued and ready to dip your toes into the world of Linux, here's how to begin.

Grab a flash drive and select a Linux distro or a few to try out. Create a virtual machine or booting your PC from a Linux USB are excellent ways to explore without affecting your current setup. If you've never tried it before, start with the Linux desktop version. That's an easier barrier to entry. It's fun to play around with.

Maybe install if you like it, maybe install it on a partition on your on your drive or on an old laptop or computer. It's fun to play around with. And if you like it, maybe install it on a partition of your drive without affecting your whole setup or an old laptop or computer. My friend Jason Kitka in the Syso IT podcast has this to say about Linux.

If you haven't, you know, used it yet or you've only used it in a work context and you've never installed it on a personal device, you know, give it a try. Partition a drive, buy an extra drive, get a Raspberry Pi something, and, fire it up and and see what the art of the possible is because, you won't regret it and you'll learn more about computers in a shorter amount of time than you would from reading about it in a textbook. Right? Experimentation is a great teacher.

So with Linux desktop, you'll quickly discover that it's not only powerful, but comes with some really neat features designed to enhance your computing experience. So what distro to start with? Everyone will tell you differently. Every single person you ask, they're gonna have a different answer. I'll make it easier for you.

If you're just starting out, try Ubuntu. It's easy to use. There's a bit less of a learning curve. If you like it, try something else. If you don't like it, try something else too.

Arch, Linux, Manjaro, Mint, Fedora, there are a lot of options to choose from. Once you've gotten yourself familiar with using Linux, try out a server distribution. Come on over to the dark side and build yourself a home server. It's awesome, but, again, be careful. What starts out as a place to play come becomes something you rely on, and then you'll find yourself with several servers at your house.

But it's a lot of fun. Now in the automate IT podcast, David Van Heerden points out that a lot of these skills that you learn help to kind of teach you how to do things in industry.

You already have enough knowledge just by playing in this environment, which I think is kind of the best thing about Linux is that it's it's quite native to having fun in it. Like, it's it's mess around and find out, right, to to to keep the language clean on here. You can you can f around and find out on Linux, pretty safely at home. And through that experience, build up that confidence to to let you dive in because, our world effectively runs on Linux. Right?

So in my opinion, tinkering and the drive for finding solutions is one of the most important skills that you could have in IT. So to wrap up, Linux is much more than just an operating system. It's a gateway to a world of freedom, customization, and innovation, and it's fun. Whether you're building a server or reviving an old laptop or simply curious about what alternative operating systems are out there, Linux offers a rich and varied landscape to explore. So why wait?

Try it out today. Have fun. Start your Linux journey and see what you can unlock, see what problems you can solve, see what you can find out. Well, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll see you next month.