O'Reilly's Linux Lab Tests a New Perspective

by Ed Stephenson
11/06/2003

If professional non-geeks pave the way, will others follow?

You'd expect a staunch open source advocate like O'Reilly & Associates to have its own Linux lab, where in-house geeks can test software on different Linux distributions in preparation for upcoming books. And you wouldn't be surprised to see this lab located in the editorial department, where authors and tech reviewers can monitor or conduct their own trials. But when you learn that the lab was built from the ground up--hardware and all--by decidedly non-geek marketing wonks, well, that's another matter.

Yet, here is Mark Brokering, O'Reilly's VP of Sales and Marketing and a veteran Linux user for more than three weeks, installing Red Hat 9.0, Mandrake 9.1, and SuSE 8.2 on Pentium machines he and his staff built or refurbished themselves at O'Reilly's headquarters in Sebastopol, California. His main partner-in-crime is Betsy Waliszewski, the product manager for open source books, who readily admits that her brain doesn't work the same way as those of the people who buy O'Reilly's technical guides. At first she just went along for the ride into the arcane territory of swap partitions, GRUB, root, KDE, Gnome, and RPM managers. But she got hooked soon enough.

Related Reading PC Hardware in a Nutshell By Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson

"I wanted the marketing staff to understand how these machines are assembled, how the components work, and how the operating systems are installed and configured," Brokering explains. "And I especially wanted the group, myself included, to become more familiar with the look and feel of the different Linux distros and desktops that are being used today. How functional are they, and how user-friendly? We want to be more conversant with the technologies that we spend so much time marketing."

Indeed, after years of marketing Linux to geeks and IT professionals, Brokering, Waliszewski, and others in their department are now experiencing firsthand just how useful Linux is on the corporate and home desktop--a hot issue now debated by many in the technology world, including people at O'Reilly. "Tim [O'Reilly] has wanted to do a Linux Missing Manual," Brokering says, referring to the company's best-selling book series. "I was skeptical about publishing a consumer book on Linux. It just didn't seem to fit the Missing Manual market. But Tim was insistent. So I decided to jump into Linux from a consumer perspective and check things out for myself."

Welcome to the Linux Lounge

Brokering's first stop was O'Reilly's PC boneyard, where, with the help of the IT staff, he pieced together an old Pentium III machine so he could install and run Red Hat Linux 9.0. Once he started using Linux, he ran into plenty of frustrating roadblocks with the unfamiliar platform, but the whole experience--setting up an old PC with Linux-friendly components, installing and then using the OS--inspired him to go further. Brokering decided to compare several Linux distributions, and thought it would be even more educational to design and build a high-performance PC from scratch so he could conveniently run those distros on one machine with multiple partitions. That's when he got the rest of his department involved.

With advice from Robert Bruce Thompson (www.hardwareguys.com), coauthor of O'Reilly's PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Brokering selected and purchased components they needed to complement an Intel D875PBZLK motherboard and Pentium 4 processor. Then the O'Reilly marketing crew spent a fascinating afternoon piecing together their new machine (dubbed "Mongrel") with their IT mentor, Larry Chapman, looking over their shoulders. A few days later, they put a new 40GB drive in an old Pentium II box and then partitioned the hard drives on both machines to run popular Linux distributions from SuSE, Mandrake, and Red Hat.

The birth of "Linux Lounge," as they called their new lab, was just in time for O'Reilly's FOO Camp ("Friends of O'Reilly"), an invitation-only "non-conference conference" in mid-October that served as a confab for 200-plus alpha geeks working on the latest computer and Internet technologies. In preparation for the event, Ximian sent disks so Brokering's crew could install and review its Professional Desktop 2.0, and Apple loaned them a new G5. But the biggest coup was getting AMD to participate.

"Right before the conference, we read that AMD and SuSE Linux were collaborating on the release of the 64-bit AMD Opteron™ processor running SuSE's not-yet-released 9.0 version, which supports 64-bit processing," Waliszewski explains. "So we invited AMD to come demonstrate its new CPU."

AMD puts in its 64 bits

Available since last April, the AMD Opteron processor is aimed at the market for servers and high-powered workstations, but until now there's been no OS designed to support it. (Not to worry; the Opteron processor has been getting high marks for its ability to run 32-bit software more efficiently than existing 32-bit processors.) FOO Camp was one of the first public viewings in the U.S. of an AMD Opteron processor-based server with an OS that can take advantage of 64-bit processing. And it was the first U.S. showing of the AMD Athlon 64 processor on a just-released motherboard for desktop users running SuSE Linux 9.0.

Of course, FOO Camp offered a crowd that could truly appreciate the benefits of 64-bit processing and its incredible native memory ceiling of 8GB. Camp attendee Tim Allwine, O'Reilly's lead database programmer (and Perl guru), is now experimenting with the platform in hopes that it will vastly speed up the enormous database of book-sale information he's amassed.

Marc Miller, AMD's strategic alliance manager who attended FOO Camp, says that AMD Opteron processors are well positioned for a strong Linux-server market, but the consumer desktop continues to be a struggle for open source support. In its bid to wrangle desktop market share from Intel, AMD has just launched AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Athlon 64 FX processors (for high-end desktops and extreme gaming), but they're expected to have initial uptake with the Windows 64-bit platform that is scheduled to launch next fall.

"I saw an article that my counterpart in Europe sent me from a Linux magazine that said, 'Oh yeah, everybody is jumping on the Linux desktop now,'" Miller comments. "We endorse that move; we support it. But expect a tough battle for Linux-based desktops here in the U.S. We think that Linux has to gain broader acceptance on the desktop side."

You're on your own

Brokering doesn't disagree. Throughout his trial with Linux, he's sent a string of email suggestions to both the editor and author of the Linux Missing Manual, based on his experiences with installing Linux, configuring the desktop, getting all the hardware to work, updating software, and adding third-party software to the mix. The books he consulted often lacked the information he needed.

"It's hard to find people who really know the Gnome and KDE desktops inside and out," he says. "The Linux geeks go to the command line to solve their problems, so they are less able to help and advise than I anticipated. Most things are fairly straightforward if you're a Linux desktop user who just sticks with whatever was packaged by Red Hat or SuSE. But if you decide to do something a little outside of the box, that can be a mess. As soon as you leave the collection of software provided in the distro, you're on your own."

Being a Windows power user, Brokering immediately did what most Windows users do: he tried to customize his Linux desktop by downloading a few basic programs, like Acrobat and RealPlayer, that weren't included with the Red Hat 9.0 distribution. That's where some of the frustrations began. While many things in the distribution are very similar to Windows, he found that some simple Windows tasks can be very complicated in Linux and can't be done without resorting to the command line.

Then there's the partition issue. Miller, whose job at AMD is to work with Linux vendors, prefers to use Linux whenever he can. But he still has to have a Windows machine, because certain programs just aren't available in Linux. "Most Linux installers ask how you want to partition the data, but most Windows users don't know what a partition is," he comments. "When I'm hand-holding people through Linux installations for the first time, I have to explain these advanced concepts to them. For the most part, Linux is still targeted toward the advanced user, and not the typical home user."

A lot of Linux tire kickers

That's precisely the perception that Brokering hopes will change. Despite the problems he encountered, he's enthusiastic about the Linux desktop and intrigued by some of the features he found in the applications, like the desktop pager (for workspace switching), tabbed and split-window browsing, and the useful applets that run in the Gnome desktop panel.

Through simple customization, he says, people can make their Linux desktops look and feel a lot like Windows, if that's what they want. And with programs like OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Evolution, they can cover all of the basics and make their PCs very functional for the tasks that most people perform. One day, Brokering left his partitioned computer at home booted to Linux. His wife started working on it and never really noticed much of a difference.

"If you need a second or third machine in your house for basic word processing, web browsing, and email, and you want something stable that doesn't cost much money, this can be a great alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office," Brokering insists.

Does this make the Linux desktop a poor man's version of Mac OS X? "Well, the Mac OS X geeks kept teasing me during FOO Camp, saying something to the effect that I should move over to OS X and get a real operating system," he says. But he still thinks there are plenty of people who would benefit from this low-cost, alternative desktop. And there are a lot of curious enthusiasts who simply want to find out what the Linux fuss is all about. "I think there are a lot of tire kickers out there. I don't know if they'll ultimately convert, but plenty of people are trying it out, just the way I did."

Waliszewski agrees. "I tried to install Linux on my laptop a couple of years ago, but it was just not user-friendly enough for me," she says. "It's so much different now with OpenOffice and other apps. So I'm actually thinking again about installing Linux on my own machine, now that I'm not 'afraid' of it anymore."