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Free Yourself from Microsoft
By Stephen Bucaro
In April 2000, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft
violated two sections of the 1890 Sherman Act. He concluded that Microsoft was a
monopoly that used anti-competitive means to maintain its dominance in Intel-based
operating systems.
Are you tired of being a slave to Microsoft’s monopolistic hold? As Mark Taber
puts it, "being forced into using rigid, poorly designed, overpriced and unstable,
bloated software". And now Windows XP stops working and you have to beg for
Microsoft’s permission to use software that you overpaid for.
Don’t subject yourself to Microsoft’s "product activation" abuse. There is
another operating system available that costs nothing, and you have the freedom to
use as many copies of it as you want without begging for anyone's permission. It’s
time to start learning about Linux.
Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system and posted the kernel source
code to the Web in 1991. Under his copyright agreement, anyone was free to use it
and modify it, as long they made the source code with their modifications available
under the same agreement. That copyright is now known as the GNU License, and the
people who develop software under the GNU License are known as the "open source
community".
There are several "distributions" of Linux. A Linux distribution is the Linux
kernel, combined with a selection of applications and utilities. Red Hat was founded
in 1994, and the Red Hat Linux distribution now holds around 70% of the Linux market.
In the past, Red Hat Linux was too complicated for anyone but computer geeks to
install. And even the computer geeks installed Linux in a "dual boot" mode, never
completely letting go of Windows. But Red Hat 7.0 features a new graphical
installation interface that auto-detects your hardware.
Although the Linux kernel source code is free, Red Hat does charge a fee for its
"distribution". The price is much lower than Microsoft Windows, and you can use as
many copies as you want with no per-seat or per-session licensing fees. Or you can
use the Red Hat 7.0 CD ROM free from a library book.
In this article I explain how to install Red Hat Linux based upon my personal
experience. My goal is to install Red Hat Linux as the only operating system on the
PC. I want to answer the questions: "Is Linux ready for prime time?" and "Can we
free ourselves from Microsoft’s monopolistic hold?"
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