Why You Want This Book

Let's face it: It's a Windows world. If you have an Intel-based PC, the odds are you own a copy of one or another of the dozens of versions of Microsoft Windows. The odds are, also, that you didn't have any choice in the matter. The hardware comes with Windows preinstalled . There are tons of software packages available for from $20 to $20,000 for PCs running that operating system, and they are right there in your local SuperCompuMegaHut. What more could you want?

In the most selfish sense, you might want all of that software for from $0 to $0. You can do that with the commercial software. This is called "piracy," and it is, quite rightly, against the law. It turns out, however, that those of us who write software also would like to get software for free. So some of us started writing code and giving it away. We get paid back in the form of the other free software written by other programmers.

At this point, thanks to people like Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Linus Torvalds (author of the Linux kernel), you can now have a complete multiuser network server operating system and a whole slew of applications for free. You can also, if you are a programmer, get all the source code for all of it and add features or fix bugs yourself, if you are so inclined.

Even if you are not a programmer, you benefit from this openness because bugs get found and fixed much more rapidly in this model than in the closed, commercial, distributed media model. And you don't have to pay an upgrade price every few months.

Still, as we said, it is a Windows world. People who are not computer scientists know Windows. They know Microsoft Office. They know only this way of doing things. And Linux is different. So how do I do useful things like I do with my Windows PC? And what can I do with a Linux PC that I never even imagined doing with my Windows PC?

That's what the rest of this book is about. At one of our darkest hours, we thought of calling this book Hooray! I've installed Linux Now What? Fortunately, our editors stared at us dumbfounded until we came to our senses. But that is still what the book is about. It is about some of the practical things you can do with Free Software.