186 DEAR HACKER

186 DEAR HACKER

We believe that manipulating any kind of surveillance or tracking device is not only acceptable but necessary. Stolen cars are nothing compared to what these things will do to us.

Dear 2600:

I am writing in response to A-$tring’s letter in the Winter 93-94 issue requesting information on UNIX-like operating systems for DOS boxes. One of the best UNIX clones I have seen is Linux.

(Excerpt from the Linux FAQ) Linux is a free, copylefted full-featured UNIX for 386 and 486

machines which use the AT bus. It is still in “beta testing” (the current version number of the kernel is less than 1.0) but is being used worldwide by thousands of people.

Free means that you may use it, change it, redistribute it, as long as you don’t change the copyright. Free does not mean public domain. Linux is copylefted under the GNU General Public License. Linux is a freely distributable UNIX clone. It implements a subset of System V and POSIX functionality, and contains a lot of BSD-isms. Linux has been written from scratch, and therefore does not contain any AT&T or MINIX code—not in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, or the librar- ies. For this reason it can be made available with the complete source code via anonymous FTP. Linux runs only on 386/486 AT-bus machines; porting to non-Intel architectures is likely to

be difficult, as the kernel makes extensive use of 386 memory management and task primitives. (End of excerpt)

As you can see, the best part about Linux is that it is free! Linux comes in many “flavors” depending upon the distribution you acquire. I recommend the Slackware distribution: it is very easy to install and is the only Linux distribution approved by J.R. Bob Dobbs.

The Slackware distribution is available on the net at its official dis- tribution site of ftp.cdrom.com . For those without net access, it can

TECHNOLOGY

be ordered on a 30-disk set on CDROM from Linux Systems Labs for $59.95. However, these folks and many like them who distribute soft- ware under the GNU Public License don’t actually send any of their profits back to the authors or to the Free Software Foundation. To be honest, I spoke with the folks at Linux System Labs this morning and they said they were considering sending 10 percent of their profits to the FSF, but they weren’t sure yet.

Be prepared to either get a new hard drive or repartition your hard drive before installing Linux. It is a complete operating system with its own file system. You will need a 386 or better with at least four megs of RAM to run Linux itself, eight megs minimum to run X Windows. The full distribution with X Windows takes up about 90 megs of disk space. However, that includes X11R5, all TCP/IP utilities, UUCP, GNU C and C++, joe, Tex, vi, emacs, four shells, kermit, mail, elm and pine, Sound Blaster compatibility, all the man pages, and full source code for everything.

I think it’s a great way to teach oneself UNIX system administration and just about anything else you want to know about UNIX. Toaster

Narragansett, RI

Dear 2600: This letter is about Xam Killroy’s article on “Build a DTMF Decoder”

in the Spring ‘94 issue.

I, for one, am an avid Commodore 64 user, as are several million people worldwide. Although the article was not completely negative, it did, in fact, state several bad points. First of all, the Commodore is not a “toy computer which currently serves as a doorstop.”

Although the 64 is not as powerful as today’s PCs, they are very user friendly. We don’t have to worry about installing a program wrong, having IRQ conflicts, or hoping that the device we just hooked up to our COM port was in the right one.

The 64 is user friendly and very simple to use and very inexpensive. So you’re probably saying, “Geez, this guy must live in the stone age.” Actually, I own a 486 DX 33, and am sad to say that the only things