I Read news.answers By Christopher J. Fearnley I read news.answers because it offers many FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions and answers documents) and other periodic postings. These informational documents inform about culture, science, technology - well, just about everything. Reading FAQs is one of the best ways to learn about the resources available on the net. There are several FAQs on navigating the net (each of which points to still more documents which helps one get their bearings). This is the best way to weed through the morass of information on the internet. Here is a very brief sampling of some of the periodic postings in news.answers: The Linux FAQ, The Anonymous FTP Sitelist, Government Information on the Internet, Internet Mall: Shopping the Information Highway, Internet Services FAQ, The Electrical Wiring FAQ, and many many more. Perhaps the most important and extensive FAQs are the ones on computers. Need help with that program? Want to learn more about your hardware? Read news.answers - it is a great resource! The `Free' Workstation By Christopher J. Fearnley When I bought my system about one year ago, I became broke. So I had to find free ways of obtaining software. I tried shareware for awhile, but my conscious (and my budget) could not afford it. I found some free software for DOS, but not enough to do much useful. They say necessity is the mother of invention and in my case this was true: I needed workstation quality software and it needed to be free. It was at this time that I discovered Linux, the free POSIX complient clone of UNIX, and the GNU project (which stands for GNU is not Unix). I discovered that there are many organized projects like GNU, Linux and X Windows which offer very high quality software under very liberal licensing agreements. I should mention that "free" does not necessarily mean non-commercial, but it does mean that you have the FREEdom to use the software in any way you like without legal or moral repercussions (there are a few restrictions on distributing some free software, but only enough to ensure that the software remains free forever). For those of you who would like support for your software, there is a burgeoning list of start-up companies that offer distribution and/or support of free software (part of their profits often go to further free software development). This month I will outline what I have discovered so far about workstation quality software for no (or very little) monetary investment. If you are interested in any program mentioned below, e-mail me at cfearnl@pacs.pha.pa.us and I will try to reply with how to get the program and tell if it's available for your platform. Right now, IBM 386, 486, and pentium PCs and compatibles are the only systems capable of running with no (that's ZERO!) proprietary software (although work is well under way to expand this success to any architecture). Nevertheless, most of the free programs discussed below will work on any system. Macs in particular are deficient in free workstation quality software (though still a lot is available) because Apple contends in court that they have the power to stop anyone from writing software that has a user interface even vaguely similar to the Macintosh's. They are therefore under boycott by the FSF (Free Software Foundation) and others. For a high-end workstation, one needs an operating system that can handle multiple compute-intensive tasks simultaneously and perhaps several users sharing the system at once. Although there are several free operating systems available, only one has distinguished itself as "commercial-grade" - Linux. This very stable, full-featured clone of Unix has numerous advanced features that make it ideal for workstation quality work. I could talk a lot about Linux, but for a workstation the reliable OS works in the background and we tend to forget about it. The important things are applications. My criteria for including a package (program or suite of programs) is that it be freely usable and that it work under Linux (most of these packages will run under any Unix system and some will run on Macs, Amigas, DOS and etc. too). To be very productive at a computer one needs programming tools. For my `free' workstation I have many. First a shell and shell scripting language are needed. The most popular free shell/shell-programming tools are GNU BASH (very full-featured), pdksh (public domain Korn shell) and tcsh (a C-shell clone). Also, we need some interpreted languages like: gawk (the GNU version of awk) and tcl/tk. C is essential (we have GNU C, one of the best C compilers and C libraries available) and a C debugger - GDB (the GNU debugger). And a bunch of other languages that will make programmers feel at home (each of the following is free to the best of my knowledge): Common Lisp, C++, Objective C, APL, modula-2, ada, OI, eiffel, scheme, prolog, GNU smalltalk, PEXlib, Xlib, Xt, bison, flex, make, and perl. A fortran compiler is almost complete - until it is available one can use the f2c script. I probably missed others. Document processing is very important. There are at least three high quality, free types of text editor available. First there are several clones of vi including elvis, vile and vim. There are also many clones of emacs including jove, jed and GNU emacs (the granddaddy of them all - by Richard Stallman). And there is joe which is a wordstar-like editor. Text formatting systems with markup languages offer several advantages over word processors. Any system should offer at least LaTeX (the premier typesetting program) and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Also, groff (the GNU version of nroff and troff, the traditional text processing system under Unix) is available for our free workstation. The Andrew suite is a multimedia document processing environment under X Windows featuring ez as a WYSIWYG word processor. It is now included with the most popular Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0. Any self-respecting workstation should provide graphics services. X Windows is not only a free graphical environment, it is the standard graphical environment for Unix workstations. X Windows itself offers a few graphics utilities like a bitmap editor. How can we convert between the many different graphics file formats? This service is provided by the Portable Bitmap Toolkit (PBMPLUS) by Jef Poskanzer. How to view graphics files? Ghostview lets us view (and print) postscript files, xdvi lets us view LaTeX's .dvi files, and xli lets us view JFIF, GIF, G3 faxes and many others. For graphing scientific data or mathematical functions there is gnuplot. There are several free mathematical systems most of which allow output to gnuplot for plotting. Finally, there are several high-end graphics systems available by anonymous ftp (gle, khoros, etc.,) - I know some of these are free, but I don't have the disk space to check them all out. There are several free database programs available. University Ingress was one of the first relational database programs developed at Berkeley. Postgres is the current Berkeley Database project. There are also several utilities developed to supplement these systems. I haven't had the need for a full-fledged multi-user database system, so I can't review these programs adequately. They do have a good reputation in some circles. A workstation should support networking and telecommunications. Linux has several basic telcom programs including seyon (for X Windows), minicom, pcomm, and kermit (also available for many other system). Linux also supports UUCP, ethernet and TCP/IP for networking (with SLIP, PPP, Term, etc.). At least one PACS member has his Linux box directly connected to the internet. All the standard programs for becoming a full-internet site are available: Mosaic, ftp, archie, telnet, etc. Finally, a workstation should have a few games available. There is no shortage of free games! Some will even use your multi-media equipment. And DOOM is in the process of being ported! In sum, right now the thrifty computer user can run a Linux workstation that can do anything other mid- to high-end workstations can do with comparable performance. Yet, it is all free - both the OS and the utilities. You need only buy the hardware. UNIX SIG Notes By Christopher J. Fearnley The most recent Beta kernels for Linux are becoming stable again after numerous new features have been added. 1.1.31 released a few days ago is already receiving rave reviews from a network administrator whose company runs a Linux network. Probably within a month or two a public release of 1.2 will be made. Next month Art Hutchison will talk about "Some General SLIP and TCP/IP Issues". He will point us to the materials needed to set up a SLIP connection and discuss some common pitfalls.