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The phrase X factor usually refers to the effect of unknowable circumstances on
any given situation. Sports fans will be familiar with an ad that urges them
to buy lottery tickets “because anything can happen”. The X factor in the ads
is the accidental poisoning of an entire football team. One fan celebrates
wildly because he alone has bet against the favourites. The X factor in
computing is the Unix (X) family of Operating Systems (O/S). No one is quite
sure if they will catch on with the public because they are competing against
the heavily favoured Microsoft.
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The Unix family began as the philosophical opposite of the lottery ads. Dennis
Ritchie, one of the co-authors of the O/S, said, “What we wanted to preserve
was just not a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around
which a fellowship could form.” Unix evolved as a collaborative effort between
Bell Labs, academia and the just plain nerds. Following a protracted legal
battle in 1988, two of the hundreds of versions of Unix became open source,
free to anyone who wanted to use them.
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And use them they did, to create O/S that are compact, stable and powerful.
The best known of the innovations, written by Linus Torvalds, bears a variation
of his name, Linux. There are many other members of the X family, including
Knoppix, QNX, FreeBSD and NetBSD. All these members of the X family are
available as free downloads from the web. Lindows, another member of the X
family, is rapidly gaining popularity because of the familiar feel of its
Graphic User Interface (GUI) and ease of use. Lindows is available for a
fraction of the cost of Microsoft Windows.
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So why don't we all use the X family? It comes down some X factors of human
nature. One big reason is that Windows is “the devil we know,” while Linux is
still “the devil we don't”. Computers are complicated enough without learning
new icons, applications, names and ways of accomplishing routine tasks.
Another reason is that many products, hardware and software, are designed
specifically for the Windows platform. Persuading them to run on the Linux
platform is sometimes difficult or impossible.
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You can take Linux for a test drive on your home computer with little effort
and no risk. Knoppix is an entire free O/S that runs from a CD. You don't
have to install on it your computer and when you're done your computer will be
just the way you left it. You will need a copy of the Knoppix CD which you can
download from www.knoppix.org. Lindows also allows a test drive with a product
called LindowsLive! that allows “Microsoft Windows users to experience Linux
without installing anything.” You can check out Lindows at www.lindows.com
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Will the X family catch on? It all depends the biggest X factor of all, the
users.
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