You ve Been Hoodwinked

You've Been Hoodwinked!

You picked this book up thinking it was about Linux. Hah! We fooled you completely! This book is only tangentially about Linux. It is really about a number of pieces of Free Software (note the capitals ”there's more about this in Chapter 1 ) that are frequently packaged with Linux in common distributions.

There are quite a few books out there on how to install Linux, how to administer Linux, how to program for Linux, and how to secure Linux. What we believed was lacking, however, was some guide for those who are new to Free Software and Open Source software as to just what you can do with a Linux system once you have one.

This book is all about things you can do either with a base Linux distribution or with software that is readily available on the Web for the Linux platform. Every single piece of software we cover in this book is available under one or another "open source" license, meaning that you can get the software for free and redistribute it freely . In all cases the source code is available for you to see and modify for your own use. The differences in the licenses tend to govern what you are allowed to do with the modified source code.

The authors have a definite bias (which you should know about up front) in favor of the GNU Public License (the GPL), which allows you to do anything with the source code except refuse to give away any work derived from it. We cover some of the reasoning behind various source code licenses in Chapter 1 .

Now, how, exactly, did we fool you? Well, although all of the software we cover here runs on Linux on Intel-based PCs, most of it will run on any flavor of Unix, from the BSD-derived systems of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD (all of which are freely available and open source and run on Intel PCs), on up to the most closed and expensive commercial proprietary versions of Unix running on the most expensive high-speed massively parallel hardware.