Check Your Fitness Level. You may want to consult your physician to make sure you’re fit enough to ride. Talk to Your Employer. Your company may offer benefits for bicyclists, such as lockers to store your bicycle, shower and changing facilities, bonuses for bike riders and more. Ask your employee transportation coordinator (ETC) or human resources manager. They can also help you discover options such as where you’ll store and extra change of clothes or if you can.

Bike to Work! A great day to give it a try is Bike to Work Day, a day when people throughout the state will leave their cars at home and instead bicycle to work.

First, it is very stable and robust, being based on the time-honored Unix operating system (more on that in the next part of this chapter). Second, it is distributed under an open source license. Open source licensing is rather simple, yet elegant. Open source means that once you obtain a piece of software, it is yours to do with as you please. Would you like to make a copy or change the source code? Under open source, the source code of the software is open to the public, and when you purchase a product, it is yours to do with as you will. In case you did not realize it, this is radically different from Microsoft, Oracle®, Sun®, and most commercial software. For example, when you buy Microsoft Windows, the manufacturer’s licensing agreement that comes with the product places rather significant restrictions on what you can do with that product. Violating that license agreement can result in losing the license to that software and, in some extreme cases, in lawsuits. Each vendor’s licensing agreement stipulates what is acceptable use of its software and what is not. Most commercial vendors do not allow you to alter their software, nor do they allow you to have access to the source code for the software. Most vendors also do not allow you to make or distribute copies of their software after you purchase it. One example of software licensing restrictions is that if you purchase a computer that comes with Windows, you cannot later sell that copy of Windows, even if you have disposed of the machine. Several eBay® sellers have been shut down by Microsoft for just that sort of activity. Also, you most certainly do not have access to its source code. With open source software, you can do anything you want with the software once you get it, and you have complete access to the source code. its stability and security, but also for its expense.

Access to source code may not be particularly intriguing to many readers. You have to be a rather highly skilled programmer to make much use of it. However, if you have skilled programmers on staff, they can take the Linux source code and make modifications to customize the operating system for your particular needs.

One note of caution is in order. What you can do with open source software is not completely unlimited. For example, you cannot put your own label on open source software and resell it. The open source license does not give you this right. If you put Red Hat® Linux and your name on a CD-ROM and then started selling copies, you might find yourself the target of litigation and possible criminal charges. The author does not claim to be an attorney and recommends that with any software, you read the licensing agreement carefully. Open source software has the least restrictive licensing of any software you can find, far less restrictive than commercial software. However, there are still some limitations. It is recommended that you look at www.opensource.org/ to see a wealth of information and links on open source software.

One advantage of an open source operating system is that a lot of the software written for the operating system also is open source. This means that, although the software selection for Linux in an average retail store might be slim, the selection of freely downloadable software on the Internet is vast.

You will also find that the Linux community is rather supportive of itself. You will find several links in the appendices of this book, and it is even possible that you might find a Linux users group in your area, especially if you live in a major metropolitan area. These people can be quite helpful to the Linux novice.

Further confusion can be avoided if you understand one more piece of information. When someone asks what version of Linux you’re running, don’t say Fedora FC5 or Debian Sarge. Fedora and Debian are distributions. The version of Linux is the information I explain here. To
add further fuel to the fire (of confusion), some distributions add special methods to compile the kernel. Hence, the sections explaining the steps for Fedora and Debian. The section on the vanilla kernel is for those who don’t need the special instructions (such as Fedora before FC4). These are generally distributions not derived from Fedora or Debian (two of the largest distributions). I can’t know all the methods for compiling the kernel for a distribution, but the ones I outline probably cover most users’ needs.

This is why my server is on the wired network. For large networks, a mix of wired and wireless computers is acceptable. For a small, home network, wireless is fine unless all your neighbors also have wireless — then things get pretty interesting! There are eight wireless access points within 150 feet of my home. Security in this sort of sit-

uation is very important, not only so that others don’t steal your bandwidth (and do things you might be blamed for), but also so that your devices don’t accidentally join other networks. Diagnosing this kind of a problem can leave you stumped for hours.

There are over 370 different supported flavors of Linux, each with a different focus. You can see the listing of official distributions at http://www.linux.org.

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian Linux. Different Linux distributions target different functional niches. The goal of Ubuntu is to bring Linux into the desktop workspace. To do this, it needs to provide a stable user interface, plenty of office tools, drivers for a myriad of peripherals, and still be user-friendly. Although different groups manage nearly every open source project, Canonical Ltd. provides a central point for development and support. Canonical, along with the Ubuntu community, can answer most of your technical (and not so technical) questions.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He wanted an operating system that was like the Unix system that he’d grown fond of at the university, but both Unix and the hardware it ran on were prohibitively expensive. A Unix version called Minix was available for free, but it didn’t quite meet his needs. So, as a computer science student, Torvalds studied Minix and then set out to write a new version himself. In his own words (recorded for posterity on the Internet, since this was in an early version of an online chat room), his work was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU.”

Writing an operating system is no small task. Even after six months of hard work, Torvalds had made very little progress toward the general utility of the system. He posted what he had to the Internet — and found that many people shared his interest and curiosity. Before long, some of the brightest minds around the world were contributing to Linus’s project by adding enhancements or fixing bugs (errors in the code).