The Bazaar: For The Love of Linux — Learning

By Paul Ferris
Editor, Linux Today

Building Apache

I’m sitting in a room of IBM 300PL’s (Fast, new IBM computers)
running Linux. The topic is “Building Apache” and the instructor is
walking the students through starting Gnome and finding Apache
sources. Apache is a Free Software web server that runs on a
multitude of platforms and is responsible for powering most of the
web servers on the Internet. It literally dwarfs any competition
statistically.

The tutorial is aimed at people beginning to use Apache. It
covers things like getting the source code from Apache, configuring, making and
customizing. These are not things that are new to me but thinking
about it, it’s something that would be quite foreign to your
average Windows user or Windows-to-Linux convert.

The Bazaar is obviously aimed at a diverse range of people. I’m
still learning, and I think that’s what’s so cool about this
new/old technology. There’s never a bottom of the pool — I just
keep diving and never hit bottom.

I sit next to a guy from Long Island, and we talk about the
transportation boycott for tomorrow. He might not be able to make
it because the subways and busses are going to be “off-line” (my
words) tomorrow. I figure I’ll have to get up pretty early and walk
here or get a cab at 7:00 AM or so.

The instructor is a helpful guy by the name of David Chun. He explains that his company
helped to sponsor The Bazaar. He has two and a half years of
experience with Apache and he’s really a Java guy — he’s building
Java middleware.

A Few Lines of Perl

I decide to slide over to another room: “Hands-On-Perl”.

The topic is obviously Perl programming, shot-gun style. I
immediately learn a regular expression trick that I didn’t
know….

#!/usr/bin/perl
while (<>) {
        if($_ =~ /^d+.dd$/){
        print"$_ looks like a number.n";
        } else {
                warn "Malformed number";
        }
}

It’s looking for a digit, followed by a decimal point, followed
by two more digits. 12.12 matches for example, while 1.2 will not
(no following digits). It’s a form of pattern recognition that I
have always resorted to awk or grep tricks to execute. Cool.

I’m just getting into Perl myself — my primary experience
before being writing awk scripts and using a2p (the awk to Perl
translator) to port them to Perl so they will run on other
proprietary, crash-prone, bug-ridden, privacy compromising
operating systems that were somewhat popular at my last job. Not
that I’m opinionated or anything…

For a taste of the things covered, you can surf some of the
examples here.
Just browsing through the directory doesn’t do it justice. It’s
nice to have someone to immediately explain what’s going on when
things don’t go your way.

One of the students is experimenting with shell programming.
Since Perl includes function like die and warn, it writes to
standard error (file handle 2 under the shell). A couple of seconds
of 2>&1 (a shell directive that ties standard error to
standard out) and he uncovers a cool thing about Unix processes —
the wheat (the good output of a program) can be separated from the
chaff (error messages). Almost all well-written Unix programs
conform to this cool paradigm. I explain this quickly, and he’s
obviously blown away.

The enthusiasm is building. I can feel it. The Linux community
will be getting hoards of new members and only an idiot could miss
this by now. I’m sure that it’s an unexplored media concept. The
stock media articles only seem to focus upon the press releases and
statistics — they don’t know the plight of the system manager, the
student, or the casual developer. These things will not remain the
exclusive territory of proprietary Unix prorgrammers – some of the
important members of the buying public are now picking up on what a
cool thing this is.

All of the classes are about half full right now, but they keep
getting more and more students. Soon it’s probably going to be hard
for me to keep browsing these things…

I look around at the crowd. About a 50% split of younger and
older types, of which I’m uncertain how to classify myself at 36
years young. Ok, I’m crossing into old fart territory fairly soon,
but I’ll only admit it when they give me a walker and I get
arthritis in my fingers.

Until then, I’m learning and loving Linux at The Bazaar.

Paul Ferris is the Web Developer and an editor for
Linux Today.

More
coverage of The Bazaar.