ZendCon - Linux 101

© 2016 Rogue Wave Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1
Linux 101
Bill Weinberg – Linux Foundation
Justin Reock – Rogue Wave Software

Who’s speaking to me?

Bill Weinberg
• Sr. Director & Analyst, Open Source Strategy
– Three+ decades experience in embedded/mobile &enterprise IT
– Founding team member at embedded OSS pioneer MontaVista
Software, former analyst at OSDL and principal at Linux Pundit
– Consulting in open source business and technology strategy, open
source management and marketing, legacy migration, etc.
– Author of ~200 articles and white papers on open source,
mobile/embedded, automotive, security and related topics

Justin Reock
• Sr. Director and Lead Architect of Rogue Wave OSS Support Team
– FL/OSS enthusiast and evangelist
– Early adopter of Linux
– Created CentOS Developer Group at Rogue Wave
– Puts Linux on everything, because why wouldn’t you?

A brief history
of UNIX…
Bell Labs (AT&T)
BSD (Berkeley S/W Dist)
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
GNU Project GNU Linux
SunOS
Next Step Mac OS X
SVR5
IRIX
HP-UX
Solaris
AIX
SCO UNIX
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Android
iOS

A brief history of Linux
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
Hello everybody out there
using minix – I’m doing a
(free) operating system (just
a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for
386(486) AT clones
Tux becomes the
Linux mascot
SCO
Lawsuit
(2003)
Invests $1B in
Linux
Top 5 Linux
Contributor
V2

Why develop on Linux?

Lots of reasons
• Powerful command line and tools
• Many options for productivity improvement – scripting, etc.
• Free as in free speech – modifiable, customizable, community-driven
• Ease of prototyping
• Accurate testing by easy recreation of production environments
• Better web development with a natural environment for Apache or nginx
• Hardened security options such as SELinux
• Paving the way for containers and microservices
• Automation through Puppet/Chef/Ansible
• Remote administration through ssh
• Scale to huge sizes without huge license costs
• Linux makes you look cool!

It’s great for web development
• Linux is the home of the LAMP stack
– Native support for major tools and frameworks
• Linux is a great web app prototyping environment
– Easily install multiple servers / instances on one machine
– Easy access to error logs for debugging
• Countless other web platforms – Drupal, WordPress, Tomcat . . .

Web dev tools
• Web application frameworks
– Node.js, Rails, Zend
• Web servers & load balancers
– Apache, NGINX, tinyHTTPd
• HTML editors and IDEs and syntax checkers and . . .

Any downsides?
• Too many ways to create “Linux apps”
– A surfeit of APIs, frameworks, run-times and tools
– No clear path to apps and interoperability (cp. Android)
– Result is fragmented app space, ISV confusion and costs
• Orphan desktop
– Tiny market share
– Limited hosting of popular commercial apps
– Mixed UX, difficult installation on some notebooks

How do I get started?

Pick your flavor
• Linux is just the kernel surrounded by a suite of supporting software
• It’s that supporting software that differentiates one flavor of Linux from
another
• Pick a flavor that suits your level of expertise, the tools you’re likely to
use, and the hardware environment on which you’ll deploy
• Main differences include package management and ecosystem,
preinstalled software, and current Linux kernel version
• Pay attention to the community as well – quick releases, fast response to
security vulnerabilities, development priorities
• Some distributions are highly focused, such as Kali Linux for Security
Professionals

Something for everyone…

Porting and interoperability
• Cross platform development
– Cross compiling with gcc and GNU tools
– Cross platform frameworks and libraries
• Emulation and libraries
– Full virtual machines – VirtualBox, QEMU et al
– Libraries and platforms – Wine, Crossover, Cygwin,
Bash-on-Windows, Steam . . .
• File systems
– Samba, NFS, FAT

Editors and IDEs on Linux
• Your favorite IDEs are already ported
• Eclipse and IntelliJ both run very well
• UX is nearly identical to other operating
systems
• Editors such as Sublime Text and Atom
are easy to install
• And classic command line editors
such as vim, emacs, and nano let you
edit powerfully from the shell

Your first install…
• Your Linux flavor’s community will provide installation media, usually in the
form of a bootable ISO
• During the install, you’ll be able to configure system, software, and network
options
• Many distros will allow you to choose a particular theme for your preinstalled
software
• Such as in the next slide, where CentOS 7 allows you to choose between
various environments
• From there, you can:
– Use the flavor’s preferred package manager to install additional software
– Download packages for anything not provided by the package manager
– Build from source!

Your first install…

Yes, Linux has GUI options too…
Gnome, inspired by
Mac OS

Yes, Linux has GUI options too…
KDE, inspired by
Windows

Embrace the shell

A quick overview of the filesystem
• Everything is a file – if it’s not a file, it’s a process
Everything is a file

Go out and play!

Bare metal loves Linux…
• Hardware vendors bring-up on Linux, consumer
hardware can be inconsistent
• Install it on your laptop or desktop computer (YMMV)
• Or on server hardware in your data center
• GRand Unified Bootloader, or grub, is supported by
most modern flavors
• Makes it easy to dual boot a Windows PC with Linux
• rEFind for Mac will let you dual boot Linux on Mac
hardware

Linux loves VMs…

And Linux loves containers…

LiveCDs
• Boot from a thumbdrive or CD directly into Linux without modifying your
storage or boot sequence
• ISO files available for many flavors, get started quickly without installing
anything!
• LinuxLive (Lili) USB Creator for Windows
– Fully automated thumbdrive creation
– Includes VirtualBox options as well as USB Boot
– Maintain persistence wherever you run it from
• Easy way to get started right now!

Raspberry Pi
• A full system in a $35 box
– 1.2ghz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU
– 1GB RAM
– 4 USB Ports
– HDMI / Composite Video
– MicroSD Storage
– 802.11n WiFi / Wired Ethernet
– Bluetooth 4.1 / BLE
• Multiple Linux builds available, easy install
through NOOBS interface

Learn more
• Wealth of content online
– Tutorials, MooCs, discussion groups, code exchanges
– Online documentation
• Linux Foundation
– Online training, MooCs, workshops, webinars
– LinuxCon and collaboration summits
– Certification and consulting
– Legal training (CLE)

Questions?

ZendCon - Linux 101

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