The Hindu Business Line : Never too old for `toys'

YOU are an ordinary PC user. Want to become an Internet service provider? If yes, Christopher Negus and Chuck Wolber have the answer in Linux Toys: Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment. All the basic software you need to be an ISP is right in Red Hat Linux, they inform. "You can set up Linux to allow dial-in modems and routing to the Internet, as well as offer Web publishing, e-mail, and file transfer." The book is an attempt to "bring together software and hardware to make some whole working projects," states the preface. "Because we're building them in Linux, the sky is the limit on where you can go with them." Chapter 1 elaborates: "While the spirit of the book is one of fun and community, the technology we describe is quite serious and becoming more powerful each day. Some of the same software we describe here is running the server computers for companies around the world."

What are the `toys'? Apart from the mini ISP, you have music jukebox, home video archive, TV recorder/player, arcade game player, home network server, home broadcast centre, temperature monitor, telephone answering centre, Web-hosting service, DogHouse Linux with BSD games, toy car controller and digital picture frame, each with "complete material list and detailed illustrated instructions."

What's this doggie thing? Chapter 13 explains: "Because the latest Red Hat Linux won't install on pre-Pentium-class computers," the authors have created a little distribution of Linux that they call DogHouse Linux. "You can copy it to a floppy and run it on most computers that have a floppy disk drive. Yes, it should work on your old 486 machine." What would it do? "You will get enough to feel what it was like to use old Unix systems, try a few classic Linux commands that will work on almost any Linux system, and play a few classic pre-Linux character-based games." You are never too grownup for these `toys'.

Varray, Lob and Acid

AT the heart of RDBMS is SQL, the structured query language. It is the language used for all operations in the relational database management systems. "It is a standardised language like C, that is, the syntax of SQL changes very little from one RDBMS to another," states P.S. Deshpande in "SQL/ PLSQL for Oracle 9i". SQL for Oracle is similar, therefore, to SQL for Ingres or Sybase. "An important feature of SQL is that it is a non-procedural language." That means you don't have to describe how to do; just describe what you want.

Unit II of the book discusses PL/SQL - the language used in all Oracle products. "PL/SQL language is used in stored programs, procedures, packages, forms and reports. It's different from other languages, as it does not have conventional input and output statements. The input is mainly from the table and output is put in the table."

What are the basic elements of PL/SQL? The author lists: "Lexical units, datatypes, user-defined subtypes, datatype conversion, declaration, naming conversion, scope and visibility, assignments, and expressions and comparisons."

You are familiar with array, but what is `varray'? It is "like an array in programming languages like C, Pascal but it has only single dimension." Okay, is LOB the top portion of lobster? No, it stands for `large objects' - a datatype to overcome the limitations of LONG datatype. "LOB has facilitated storage of unstructured data like text document, graphic images, video clips and sound." Maximum size of LOB is 4 GB and it supports random access.

ACID is not what hooligans throw on people, but the essential properties of transaction: atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. "Atomicity means the effect of the transaction is either full or null. Consistency means the transaction should generate consistent data defined by application logic. Isolation indicates level of interference in one transaction by the other transaction. Durability means that the effect of transaction is durable irrespective of nature of storage." Now, answer a simple question: "Select a querying book."

Wear your Red Hat

INSTALL, tune and configure Fedora and Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3. Navigate GNOME and KDE desktops to run the latest applications. Learn to use the Linux shell, file system, and text editors. Try out the latest security techniques for detecting and dealing with attacks and setting up encryption keys. Discover how to install extra software packages to play games, enhance security, and administer Linux. Install Linux on a laptop and manage power events with acpid. And more.

All these are what Christopher Negus discusses in "Red Hat Linux ver. (10) Bible: Fedora and Enterprise Edition," a book that comes with 3 bonus CD-ROMs with full installation of the software including all binary packages.

Who are you? Asking this question in the preface, the author continues: "You don't need to be a programmer to use this book. You may simply want to know how to administer a Linux system in a workgroup or on a network. You may be migrating from Microsoft OS to Red Hat Linux because of its networking and multiuser features."

As with accounting, where you can't learn unless you do, so with computer system. "Get your hands on it." So, the book adopts "a task-oriented approach." Well, you've been holding your question thus far: What is Linux? "A phenomenon waiting to happen," writes Negus in chapter 1. "The computer industry suffered from a rift. In the 1980s and 1990s, people had to choose between inexpensive, market-driven PC operating systems from Microsoft and expensive, technology-driven operating systems such as Unix. Free software was being created all over the world, but lacked a common platform to rally around. Linux became that common platform." Linux is a free OS that was created by Linus Torvalds when he was a student in 1991. "Torvalds then released the system to his friends and to a community of `hackers' on the Internet and asked them to work with it, fix it, and enhance it. It took off." The focus of Linux was "on keeping communications open among software developers." Their common goal was to get the code to work, "without much concern about who owned the code."

What is Red Hat Linux? "Several companies and organisations began gathering and packaging Linux software together into usable forms called distributions. The main goal of a Linux distribution is to make the hundreds of unrelated software packages that make up Linux work together as a cohesive whole. For the past few years, the most popular commercial distribution has been Red Hat Linux."

And if you are working on a Linux project, you perhaps know what book to keep by your side.

Books courtesy: Wiley Dreamtech (www.wileydreamtech.com)

Books2Byte@thehindu.co.in

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
On your mark, headset... go!

You need the support

Join the action!

Do codes make life complex?

Problems galore

Network problem

McCarthyspeak!

No clear view, for now

Growing drop by drop

Quiz

Never too old for `toys'

Cartoon