Cheerful. If there was one word that I would choose to describe Marcel Gagne's new book, it would be cheerful. The front cover is a cheerful yellow, and Marcel's cute toddler son and beautiful wife beam at you from Konqueror thumbnails on the front. The back cover depicts Marcel in a funny tall white French chef's stove pipe hat, mugging for the camera with a bottle of wine and an overly zealous expression on his face. Even the title of the book is guaranteed to make you snicker, Moving to Linux (second edition): Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!
But proceed with caution! Marcel Gagne is no Mary Poppins! Like a skilled Judo instructor, Marcel is just using humor to get you comfortable for that first Judo fall, because he has high expectations of his intended newbie audience. While some authors of Linux how-to books reserve the command line for very late in the book in an appendix, or leave it out altogether, Marcel has you setting up swap files and your network by and configuring your boot preferences by page 27. Like the student of an adept martial arts master, there you are on page 27, lying flat on your back staring at the boot config commands hovering in front of your face, and it didn't hurt at all! Gee, maybe even a newbie like me can do this!
And therein lies the value of Marcel's book. His philosophy clearly lies with those who believe that if we are not taught to fear the command line, we won't. In getting his readers to move from Windows to Linux, Marcel effectively breaks with the stupification of the masses from the word go. His attitude is revealed in this Washington Post question and answer session with Peter van der Linden, another author of another excellent Linux how-to book which was reviewed here by Mad Penguin™. Marcel and Peter were asked what they thought were the greatest obstacles for Windows users moving to Linux. Marcel gave this answer:
“The biggest obstacle is fear. Modern Linux distributions are easy to install and easy to use. Unfortunately, we are constantly presented with messages telling us that it's too hard and that the average person couldn't possibly grasp the complexity. That's rubbish.
“People aren't stupid and people who use computers learn new things all the time. Every time you buy and/or install a new package, you need to learn it (even in Windows). Every time you upgrade to a new version, there are changes and you need to learn. If you upgrade from Win 9x to Win XP, you will have to relearn some things. The same is true of learning to use Linux.
“My parents, who are in their late sixties, got their first computer about five years ago. They have only ever run Linux and yet they manage to write e-mails, surf the Web, chat on IM, play games, etc. In other words, everything a typical computer user does.
“Linux isn't that difficult. We're just constantly told that is it and the resulting fear is the biggest obstacle. Pick up a book with a good live Linux distribution and start playing. It's fun and the fear will quickly vanish.”
That quote essentially tells you everything you need know about what to expect from Marcel's book. If you were looking to buy a Linux book that will help that newbie in your life move themselves beyond passive consumption of computer software, Marcel's book is for you.
An excellent outline of Marcel's table of contents is available here on Bookpool.com, and so this review will not recount those contents in detail. Instead, I will give you the flavor of the book, something that is not available in a TOC review.
Life is not easy for authors of Linux how-to books. Almost every Linux version (called a distribution, or “distro” for short) comes with gobs and gobs of interesting software packages. So the Linux how-to author is faced with tons of information, and not much space to fit it into. To make matters worse, there are lots of great selections for buyers to browse. How does the beleaguered author cope?
Hint. It's the distro
Marcel coped with this problem of differentiation in an innovative way: he created his own Linux distro! Holy lower-barriers-to-entry, Batman! You sure couldn't do that with Windows, since it is flat-out illegal to modify the package. One of the tests for a good Linux how-to book is the adroitness with which the author integrates his or her chosen distro with the text. Marcel excels in this area. In one fell swoop, he solves the problem of how to cover the whole gamut of applications in his Knoppix-based distro, while also standing out from the crowd. His solution ultimately returns to the core thing which makes open source uniquely powerful: the community.
His distro takes you to a home page with hyperlinks to his very own Linux Users Group, where you can get great support from a community that he has created from scratch. When I first started using Linux as a simple end user in late 2000, my greatest concern was where to go to ask stupid questions in the event that my Linux guru friends were too busy to take yet another tech support call. It certainly would have been nice to have a resource like Marcel's community available back then.
While writing this review, I signed up for and lurked on the WFTL-LUG email list, to get a flavor for the kind of questions that were asked, the quality of the replies, and the speed of the replies. I was generally impressed with the amount of traffic on the list. You won't have to wait too long to get an answer to your question, and in fact, your question might already have been asked and answered in the email list archive, which is browsable and searchable. The level of expertise on the list is a nice mix between newbies helping each other, along with contributions by more expert users, including Marcel himself.
His community is international, which has two key advantages. First, rust never sleeps and if your community's is international, then you will probably always find someone awake and on line to help out. (Check out his international WFTL logo contest here). Second, much of the progress in Linux and free open source software is being made outside the United States (Marcel himself is often referred to as Canada's Linux Guru), so it really helps to have brain power from around the world in your LUG.
Of course, don't go to the WFTL-LUG with the expectations that Marcel personally will answer every question that you pose. The whole point of community is spreading out the costs of producing the code, testing the code, and supporting end users. If you are a newbie, start out by lurking a little bit first (lurking means just reading without posting questions or answers), so that you will get a sense for the best way to phrase your questions, and what to expect in the way of answers.
As indicated in Marcel's Q & A reply quoted above, Marcel's distro is a live CD, which means that you can simply drop his CD into your CD-ROM drive, reboot your computer, and your computer will now run off of Marcel's WFTL Linux operating system in your CD-ROM, without touching your hard drive. It's another way of Marcel making a newbie comfortable with Linux. You can play around your new operating system, while still returning to Windows and thereby make a nice, slow transition to Linux at your own pace.
A closer look at Marcel's WFTL distro
“But wait,” you say, “WFTL? WTF is that?” I also felt kinda embarrassed at not being able to figure out what that acronym meant at first. After all, I read Slashdot daily, and yet somehow, here I was, out of the loop, struggling to figure out what the heck WFTL was. But don't worry. You're not dumb. Marcel is just playing a practical joke on you. No one could reasonably be expected figure out what WFTL means, and that's the point. Like the rest of his book, the name of Marcel's Linux Users Group (LUG) is funny and whimsical, and you are expected to do a wee bit of digging, because Marcel doesn't disclose the meaning of WFTL right up front. I dug eagerly through the first several pages of his book looking for the secret. Eventually, my diligence paid off. WFTL = Writer and Free Thinker at Large.
And so it is with all of Marcel's book, from beginning to end. Like a great teacher, Marcel doesn't preach to you, so much as spark your interest in finding out more. He sends you off on Easter Egg hunts, so that you can enjoy his jokes, twists and odd-ball sense of humor. He gives you helpful exercises, and expects you to follow along with them.
Let's examine his WFTL distro more closely. Skeptics might say that there are an awful lots of Linux distros out there already, so why create more? Also, creating a distro is one thing, but maintaining it is another thing. There are constant updates for all the various applications found in the typical Linux distro, including Marcel's distro. Is Marcel really capable of keeping up with all the changes? As Marcel acknowledges in his book, many of those distros are much easier to install to your hard drive than his WFTL distro. In fact, for the purposes of installation, Marcel actually encourages you to go out and get another distro. Don't all of those points add up to one big pain in the patootie for the hapless end users who are Marcel's target audience?
Answer: No. His distro is just for fun. Go back to the above-linked Washington Post quote. Marcel is telling you that he wants you to just experiment first before doing an install. His distro is itself a clear message to the thoughtful newbie about the flexible nature of free open source software. One guy, working by himself, was able to cobble together a decent software package that will rival a very expensive operating system out of Redmond, Washington. For the price of a single self-help book, you get an office suite (OpenOffice.org); a graphic image manipulator (the GIMP); digital photo management software (Konqueror & DigiKam); multimedia software (XMMS, Noatun, KaudioCreator, K3B, Juk; decent games; and of course, the book that will help you make meaningful use of all of the above.
Also, Marcel's book has the advantage of being distro neutral. There are several good Linux how-to books that are dedicated to just one distro, and while those books do justice for their readers, Marcel doesn't have to face the criticism that he favored one distro over another. Fans of free open source software can often become quite passionate about supporting one distro over another. By staying neutral and basing his distro on a proven base distro (Knoppix, which is based one of the granddaddies of them all, Debian), Marcel gracefully avoids those issues and provides his readers with skills which are transferable from one distro to another.
Nor does Marcel starve you for distro choices. He concludes his book with an appendix covering the installation of four different leading GNU/Linux distros: SUSE, Mandrake (aka Mandriva), Fedora, and Xandros, each of which are free as in beer (and free as in freedom). Having installed four of those distros myself on quite a few occasions, I can vouch for the usefulness of Marcel's installation tips. Here's where Marcel's distro-neutral approach pays dividends. Having learned how to accomplish fundamental tasks common to each of these distros, you are now free to download and play with them at your heart's content.
The network is the computer. (Thanks, Sun)
It might sound cliché, but it's true that Marcel's choice of a distro can lead the reader to the cutting edge of PC use. Open source is changing our understanding of what a “personal computer” actually means. He clues you in to house to carry your computer in your pocket, and I'm not talking about PDAs here. Early on in the book, Marcel helps the reader anticipate the fact that the reader might not want to go through all the hassle of setting up his or her “computer,” only to have to shut down the CD-ROM and reboot without installing Marcel's WFTL distro. Marcel explains that the reader can save his or her configuration, along with his or her data files, to a USB flash drive, so that when the user reboots the WFTL CD, the settings will be preserved. As Marcel explains,
“The beauty of using the USB memory key is that you can take your WFTL Knoppix disk with you; wherever you go, you have a USB memory key in your pocket and all your configuration and files handy.”
This insight is Marcel at his best. Your files. As you want them. When you want them. Where you want them. On any computer that will let you boot from a CD-ROM. Do you travel a lot? No problem. As Gertrude Stein said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” (Page 69). Your computer environment has traveled with you. Are you unhappy with the way that Windows keeps locking up on the computers that you come across in your travels? Ban the bugs by hooking up your 1 GB flash drive and firing up your WFTL disk. Or any other Knoppix-based distro. And there are lots of those.
