This appeared in the magazine on the Internet.
Dated.
Linux is rightly regarded as the first and most significant operating system to be built around the Internet. In addition to its actual meaning, that statement can be read rather literally! From it’s origin by a single Usenet posting, to the latest distribution that can be yanked off the various sites on the Internet; there has been a synergy between the growth of Linux and the growth of the Internet. This is most reflected in the kind of support that Linux offers for the Internet. Let us examine the various kinds of Internet apps that Linux supports.
A significant core of Linux users out on the Internet still operate mainly out of telnet windows and command line systems. It is interesting to note that most of the time; these users also have access to X windows, but still prefer the text-based access. A point in support is the slashdot site that allows you to configure your account for plain old lynx access! With X Windows as some kind of a default across the Linux world, the graphical side of Internet applications is growing in leaps and bounds. Most of the rest of this article will only examine apps that broadly fall into these two important categories.
Some of these utils discussed below are standard on many versions of Unix, so these apps are really more Unix oriented than just Linux. The graphical sides of these applications are also not really Linux specific (actually, they generally are X specific!), since they are generally shipped with their code, they can be compiled on just about any Unix and X compliant system.
Although rather strictly speaking, gopher should not be here, it is in many ways a precursor to the actual web browser. Gopher is a very useful means of scanning the vast amounts of information stored at various sites. Much before what is now know, as the Internet was in place, gopher was regularly used to access and obtain information. Other utilities of interest here are archie and veronica. These also can be used to navigate information available on the Internet.
Wget is tool that can be used to surf the Internet, abeit not directly. What Wget can do is to download files or pages from the net (it understands just about HTTP and FTP) and ensure that the files are available for access offline or otherwise. How it manages to do this when working in the background, over unstable and slow connects without requiring continuous user control is simply unbelievable. However that is not just all about Wget, there are many more things that it can be configured into doing. It is very useful for creating an entire copy of a site and then being able to surf it offline.
Lynx is the most famous of all the text applications for the Internet. Originally started off at the University of Kansas, this text-based browser is kept up to date by a dedicated band of followers. It bravely tries to stay afloat in this world of frames, tables, and Java applets. For the people who use it, the speed that text access provides is worth all of it. However, beware if your lynx is an old version; do not expect it to understand the new fangled pages you throw at it.
The old favorite in the Linux world is the NCSA Mosaic browser. One of the first and the earliest, this is an interesting app, even if it is not really that popular. Netscape Navigator is by far the most commonly used graphical web browser. It is stable, easy to use and extremely effective. The additional components of this software include an email client, messaging software and other interesting add ons which make it a very attractive and complete package for Internet access.
Talk is that simplistic software that everyone wishes he had the brainwave of creating first! Simple and efficient, this allows you to chat one on one with another person anywhere on the Internet. An interesting fact to note here is that IRC (Internet Relay Chat) software were originally written simply because talk was considered rather restrictive. Another point to the open source community I think!
Ping (Packet InterNet Groper) is another famous Unix utility. Its name ‘ping’ is supposed to be the sound that occurs when submarines sonar detect each other. This utility does something very similar to sonar detection. It allows you to ping another machine, user, or site to see if it is active, and the other side will ping you back in response. This particular software has been the source of many of the system attacks in the past, so careful how, who, and where you ping!
Finger is a utility that is very similar to Ping. This utility is also used to check whether a user is present and working on a network. Once you knew that the user is up, you could sent him a talk request or even chat with him.
Linux offers a plethora of choices in terms of chat clients. After all, chats were invented on Unix, and Linux has to live up to that reputation. The original irc app is a part of the learning process of getting used to chats and Unix. Who can forget all the /msg commands that have to be feverishly typed if a semblance of a private conversation is to take place? Yet, all the GUI’s come along and make the whole process so easy and so boring. Hmmm. Perhaps, interactive irc clients should be banned on chats .
Among the many ircII clients available, BitchX seems to be the preferred choice of getting onto chats. It is completely extended version of ircII 2.8 and is available on many platforms. It is a stable and very popular software and supports all forms of file transfer, user tracking, multiple channels, flooding, and other mysterious functions! Among the other worthy contenders, Xchat and xirc are also very useful software. You can scout around and probably find a client written for your server who ought to be more specific and suited to your use.
For all those ICQ fans out there, Mirablilis is trying to create a complete version of ICQ for Linux. But, until that comes out there are a host of clones on the Internet that allow you to use your existing ICQ account on Linux. Licq, Kicq, and gnomeicu are some of the stable and powerful apps that are available on the Internet. Gnomeicu is part of the Gkticq project. There are however other text and curses based clients that emulate most of the functions that can be found in other versions of ICQ.
Newsgroup access is also particularly simple in Linux. Specific newsgroup servers ship with most of the Linux distributions. These have to be configured and set up, but once that is done, access is pretty simple. Apart from the command line tin, there are many apps that can be used to customize and understand the news groups that you want to read and be a part of.
In the graphical world, the readers that are worth of some mention are Xrn, Krn, News peruser are some of the very neatly written apps that can be used to access Usenet posts. These allow you to follow the threads of the newsgroups that you are interested in with ease, in addition to the defaults of being able to read and post to the Usenet.
Telnet is the default method by which the entire world logs onto their accounts from anywhere. This comprehensive utility allows you to connect to a server and then use the various facilities available to you. At a very default text based level, you can find this on every system. There are some X versions of this that are pretty interactive and more easy to use than the command line variant. It is interesting to note that the same app is available on almost all operating systems, virtually unchanged.
Ever wondered what the IP address of was? Ever gnashed your teeth after being stumped with an email id that went ? Then relax, the solution to all your problems is here. Nslookup will give you a large amount of details on a particular IP number or a domain name. Apart from simple facts, it will give you even mail access details. So, if you needed an IP address to bomb a site, well now you know how exactly to go about finding it out.
Additional utilities exist to tell you the status of your connect, optimize it and so on. One of the interesting utilities is a sniffer. A what? Yep, that is right, a packet sniffer. What this application does is sneaks a peek into each of the packets that are being sent around. Very useful for a variety of reasons, most of them being not so very polite! Still in terms of learning many of the basic concepts of the protocol, this could be a useful place to really dig in deep.
There are many automatic and connect dialers that are configured for Linux. Some of these are the good old shell variants like the much beloved minicom. Others are the more sophisticated variants Wvdial that can setup a large number of modems, then go ahead, and connect you to a server or your friendly ISP with the minimum of fuss. This tool in particular is very well suited to the kind of dialup connections that are increasingly becoming common. And, before you even ask, there is even a version for X that is more user friendly than the default version.
The entire spectrum of the PPP tools available with Linux allows for a great deal of flexibility when trying to connect to the Internet. Among the command line apps, the pppd package is amazingly flexible and immensely useful, especially if you are Linux native. If not, the technical details of how you go about setting up your connect are not particularly simple, so either find a script that works for your server or find a neat little app that does the same. There are many that fit this bill.
To add to the fun, the GnomePPP package is out. True to its intentions, it does really make PPP dialup connectivity to the Internet absolutely painless. Written as a GUI running off X, via the GTK+ toolkit, this app has the clean GNOME interface that makes life so very simple. It comes with an account manager, auto dialer with login scripts that you can customize. If you have ever written a script that you type your login name, enter your password and such things, well now your dialup account can be similarly configured. This app is actually an updated rewrite of EzPPP an X based PPP configuration tool. It is in many ways a second version of EzPPP.
Uucp (Unix to Unix copy) is part of the history of networking on Unix. From a simple file transfer or copy client it has now grown into an institution all by itself. Developed at AT&T in 1976 (Wow!), this app is not so much in use today, but is a part of the learning process of how Unix protocols are created. Today, if you have a Unix system and it claims to be able to network, then you can be sure that in one form or the other, uucp is there on the system.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is available as default on every Linux system. There are varieties of graphical interfaces to FTP clients. These include the more famous Gftp, Ncftp, Xftp and countless others. The text based FTP versions are not very sophisticated in terms of ease of use or flexibility. The graphical versions can tell you the status of each download, how much has arrived, lets you start and stop downloads and so on. They even have reached the stage of being able to drag and drop files instead of obtuse “mget mk*.*” operations. Your specific needs dictate, which of these clients are to be used.
For Zmodem and Ckermit(which are about the most dominant file transfer protocols in the software world) there are many applications which will provide a clean and consistent interface without giving you too many headaches.
There are many apps that should find a mention here, including ones that help create CGI scripts, modify links, maintain information about hits etc, but they are more dynamic than most other kinds of software. There are many sources on the Internet for both well-written apps as well as how to go about writing them.
The greatest HTML editor that you could find in the Linux world is the eternal X-Emacs. Along with some add on skins, this software blazes in the hands of a professional. Other interesting editors include the asWedit and WebTk, which should serve an interesting evening of creativity, if you can get yourself started on them.
From the very powerful Php, Perl, python to local site specific search engines there are a variety of apps on Linux that help you to create and manage a professional site. These include advanced on-the-fly page creation mechanisms, automatic modifications, link checks etc. After all, superb sites such as slashdot and freshmeat are proud to operate out of Linux. Thus, dynamic presentation of continuously changing content and automatic updates are very much possible using Linux.
There are many unusual sides to games on Linux. First, most of them share source code, so if you really want to get past a particular level, you can after a wee bit of tinkering! Second, they come in various shapes and sizes that seem unusual to the rest of the non-Unix world.
The standard shoot em down types of the Doom, Quake variants are already there. Nothing very unusual about them, stable and pretty quick, these are default for gamers. There is however limited to non-existent support for other games that are very common on other operating systems. This however is changing. Recently, Microprose announced that their eternal classic Civ would be ported to Linux for network play over the Internet.
Coming back to Linux, its things like MUD’s (Multi User Dungeons) and MOO’s (Multi O? O?) that are so fascinating about the world of Linux gaming. These are games in which you enter an imaginary world and live, fight, and travel within it. Remember, when you are a MUD, so are others, and you might meet up with them! Mordor is a fine MUD that will take fans of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings right back into the book. Filled with fascinating references to runes and wizards, this game is endless delight.
Another interesting app is the good old Gnuchess. Coupled with networking this app allows you to play with someone anywhere in the world. But, that is not all. You can even log into a dedicated chess server that routinely rattles off grandmaster games. The chess server is a machine that is dedicated to playing chess games, is very fast and very intelligent.
There are a few firewall and filter software available for Linux. Generally speaking, these are scripts or apps that are written specific to the server that you are using. So, whether you favor Apache or the CERN httpd server for access, you could set up some sort of basic protection and filtering mechanism for your site. You could therefore, as an example use an Ipfilter to simply monitor all the IP packets that are being sent out of you system. In addition, there are apps that will study the nature of traffic to and from your site, allow you to store all the statistics, optimize the server functions and so on.
IPSec (IP Security) stands for the IETF’s (Internet Engineering Task Force) recommendations on secure packet communication. At a very basic level, what is required is that each packet of data being shipped out is encrypted and decrypted suitably. This will ensure that the entire conversation between the server and the client is completely secure. As is to be expected, the Linux world was there first with the very first working implementation of IPSec.
An interesting application to try out sometime is the groupware and email client named Goldmedal. It has all the standard groupware functions and it rather neatly implemented. It is interesting in the approach it takes to solving common intra-company communication problems. And, what’s more, it’s on Linux!
Have you faced the horrible prospect of going through the motions of the download of this really big file only to get cut midway? Restarting from scratch seems like this terrible torture. With Downloader you can schedule, organize, stop, restart and continue your downloads at your own sweet pace. This impressive and rather stable software ensures that you don’t get frustrated. From now on your connect suddenly dying on you doesn’t make a difference.
There are hundreds of Linux apps being added to the Internet every day. There are also hundreds of Linux users being added to the Internet every day. Moreover, these users are using these apps to access and productively use the resources of the Internet. As the importance of the connected machine rise, we can see the clear and inescapable fact that the popularity and use of Linux as an operating system will also rise. More now than ever before, only an operating system and its applications that are both network synergistic and network aware can survive. The next great shift in computing is towards the networked world.
The digital prophet, Nicholas Negreponte predicted of a great switch from cable to wireless. In a larger sense, the continued rise of the Internet will see a switch from operating system specific apps to something that is network aware and network compatible. When that happens, you can be sure Linux and Linux users will be there. At the forefront of the battles that change our times, the open source community will lead. Pings and Fingers apart, wherever you are, it will find you. Will you join this battle?