Copyright H D Russman (hdrussman@uklinux.net) This document can be freely distributed and modified (I would appreciate it if I were notified of any modifications), as long as this copyright notice is preserved. However, it cannot be placed under any further restrictions, and a modified document must have the same copyright as this one. Also, credit must be given where due.

Linux for Senior Citizens

Linux for senior citizens? Am I crazy? Surely everyone who has heard of Linux knows that it is an operating system strictly for geeks, i.e. for young men who are obsessed with computers and have nothing better to do with their time than to write and share programs to exploit the more obscure features of their hardware. And everyone knows that Linux is much harder to learn and use than Windows, so why would I be recommending it for little old ladies who are probably terrified of computers anyway?

Well, "what everyone knows" is more often false than true. And whether something is difficult or not depends very much on where you are starting from. I certainly am not recommending Linux for anyone who has never used a computer before.

For such people, I believe, Windows really is a better option: it is very easy to learn the basics, there are plenty of ABC-level books to help you, and most Internet Service Providers assume that you are using it anyway. But many people now in their 60s and 70s (especially women who worked previously as clerks and secretaries) have used computers before.

They used them at work in a thousand company offices during the 1970s and 1980s, typing away at a command line on old-fashioned visual display units or even more old-fashioned printing terminals. They never actually saw the computer, which was locked away in a special computer room, tended by a mystic priesthood of machine operators, but they often became highly proficient at using the software.

Modern PCs, with their sophisticated graphical user interfaces, seem so different from those old mainframe computers that many oldsters have never considered the possibility of transferring the expertise which they accumulated during their working lives. They understand roughly how computers used to work: you gave a command, the computer obeyed it, then printed out a prompt to show that the job was done and that it was ready for another command.

It might seem tiresome but at least you were in control throughout; the machine simply did as it was told. Now, with Windows, the system seems to be in control and you have no idea how it all works, how that pretty desktop is put together, what the icons and menus really are or how they get the job done. You can quickly learn which sequence of mouse clicks will file a document or connect you to the Internet but you don't know why it works like that.

Nor, when you ask your children, can they tell you. Windows is a complex mosaic of small but vital programs with obscure names, which start up secretively behind a splash screen; if even one of those components goes wrong, the computer may not start at all. It's not surprising that many older people feel unsafe using it, even without all that they may have heard about viruses and worms.

People of my generation were brought up to be wary of technology. Many of us are still a bit paranoid about it; in order to feel safe, we need to understand what we are doing, why it works, and how to fix things when it doesn't work. We were taught always to read the manual before using any machine, but there is no manual for Windows. There are loads of books and magazine articles telling you how to do things in Windows but little or nothing on how the system actually does what it does.

For most young people today, that doesn't seem to matter. They are content to lie back and let themselves be carried along by a tide of technology that they regard as fundamentally benign. But we need something different, something that I believe Linux can supply better than any other operating system.

For a start, Linux is a very easy system to understand. If we stick to text mode for a moment, there are really only four components.

  1. The kernel manages all the hardware and also looks after all running programs, seeing that they get their fair share of system resources. The kernel is itself a program, one that is always running. Indeed, strictly speaking, the kernel is Linux.

  2. The shell provides the interface through which you, the user, interact with the system. This is the program that prompts you for commands and then executes them. You can also use the shell as a kind of programming language; these stored "programs" are called shell scripts and allow you to automate jobs that you do frequently. Linux provides a choice of shells, each of which gives a slightly different look and feel to the system, but most people use a shell called bash. This is the shell that Linux will provide for you if you don't ask for a different one. The shell is there for you as soon as you have logged on, and exiting from it or interrupting it is equivalent to logging off.

  3. User processes start their lives as commands that you give the shell. Each command launches a separate process that runs a specific program in your name. Some of these programs do a quick job like listing the files in a directory and then terminate. These are often called utilities because they help you to utilise the system in a general way. Others are interactive programs like editors, which have their own internal commands and continue to run until you exit them. Others again are applications that allow you to use your computer to do something specific like playing a CD. Only one process at a time can access your 'terminal' (i.e. your keyboard and screen) but you can have any number of processes running in the background.

  4. Some processes are launched by the system when it starts up (boots) and run permanently in the background. They are called background services or daemons, a Latin (originally Greek) word which means a friendly spirit. Each daemon is there to provide a service which you may use at any time. Think of Aladdin's genie! For example the at daemon allows you to put on a delayed job to run "at" a specific time; in this way you can schedule big jobs to run when the machine is less busy. The cron daemon similarly handles jobs that should be run regularly at particular times or on particular days or dates. The gpm daemon lets you use your mouse for copying and pasting. And so on. Unlike the background services in Windows, Linux daemons do not start behind a splash screen; you can see them coming up one by one, note their names if you're interested, and find out from the online manual what they actually do.

Kernel, shell, user processes, background processes. That's it, folks! As far as the kernel is concerned, all the others are just programs which it runs. They mostly run independently of each other so that if, for example, a particular background service fails to start properly, the rest of the system will still come up and allow you to diagnose and fix the error. And if there are services you never actually use, you can save on processor time and memory by simply switching them off permanently. With Linux, you are the one in charge.

What if you prefer a graphical user interface (GUI) like Windows? For that, you merely need two more programs: the X server and a window manager. The X server controls your video card, keyboard and mouse when you are working in graphical mode; in text mode these are all controlled by the kernel, like all the other hardware. The X server paints pictures on the screen in response to instructions from its clients, the graphical applications that you are running, and from the window manager. It also harvests mouse clicks and keystrokes and passes them to its clients.

But the X server is fundamentally a dumb program and the applications don't know anything about each other. So if application A tells the X server to overpaint a part of the screen containing application B's window, permanently hiding that window from the user, the X server will cheerfully do it. That's why you need one other program, the window manager, to keep order on the graphical desktop.

It is the window manager that puts frames around the windows and buttons on the frames, and controls what happens when you click on those buttons. It therefore determines the overall look and feel of the interface. The window manager also keeps track of which application you are currently using and instructs the X server to send the keystrokes that it harvests to that program and not one of the others.

But, most importantly, it keeps a kind of internal database of the windows and what they look like, and it is this that allows you to treat windows as objects that you can move around the screen. For example, when you move a window sideways by dragging it with your mouse, what actually happens is that the window manager tells the X server to overpaint that part of the screen with an image of what was there before and repaint the window in its new location. Similarly when you pull a window up from the bottom of a stack of windows, it is the window manager which tells the X server to overpaint that part of the screen with its own memory of what that window looked like when it was last visible.

So the simplest kind of graphical interface in Linux is just the X server and a window manager, shepherding along a flock of applications, which might include a word processor, a web browser, a spreadsheet, and so on. In fact you can run just about any graphical application in this way. There are many different window managers that you can use; you can experiment and choose one whose look and feel you like.

Such a GUI runs fast even on old machines, which is a boon to those retired people who may be on limited incomes. Besides, people of our generation were brought up to be thrifty and resent having to throw away a perfectly good computer and buy a new one just to accommodate the demands of resource-hungry software. And, as the system is so simple, there is very little that can go wrong with it. You can start your GUI from the command line (particularly useful if you only want to use it occasionally), or you can have it started for you by Linux every time the computer boots up. In that case you will be presented with a graphical login box to collect your name and password instead of a login prompt.

The cost of this simplicity is that you don't have all the facilities which Windows provides. In particular, you can't configure your GUI just by filling in a series of dialog boxes. If you don't like the default appearance and behaviour of your window manager, you will have to reconfigure it by editing its configuration file by hand. It's not difficult to do; there is plenty of online documentation to guide you and you only have to do it once anyway. But if you want a GUI that is more like Windows, providing desktop icons, themes, etc., and allowing you to configure it graphically, then you must use one of the modern Linux desktop environments like GNOME or KDE.

Desktop environments provide a good stepping stone for Windows users who are coming over to Linux, but inevitably they have many of the disadvantages of Windows itself. They are big and complex. They need a good modern computer with a fast processor and plenty of memory (at least 128 MB) if they are to run at a reasonable speed. And it is very difficult to understand how they work. In short, they lack precisely that delightful simplicity which can make Linux so attractive to us senior citizens. If you want a system that you can completely understand and that is not fussy about the kind of computer it runs on, then you do not want GNOME.

The point is that Linux gives you the choice in a way that Windows doesn't. If you feel that you really need graphical configuration, themes, desktop icons and so on, you can have them. If you have a greater need for an interface whose workings you can understand, that will run graphical applications reasonably fast on a computer which is not the latest model, then you can have that instead. And you can "mix and match".

For example, I do not use GNOME — I prefer to use a small but powerful window manager called fvwm directly with the X server — but I do use the GNOME file manager nautilus because it has a nice user interface; it shows graphical files as thumbnails, has built-in viewers for text and image files, and allows me to put shortcuts on my desktop. It loads rather slowly compared to simpler file managers, but nothing like as slowly as the complete GNOME system would do. In this case, I am prepared to make a trade-off on speed because I only have to load the file manager once in each session.

You make a similar trade-off in practice when it comes to configuring your window manager. Obviously it is easier to do this by choosing options from a dialogue box, as GNOME and KDE allow you to do, than by editing a text-based configuration file, but the difference is probably most significant for teenage geeks who like to change the whole appearance of their desktop every few weeks. If you are only going to do it once, making the desktop look and behave the way you want and then sticking with the result for perhaps the next five years, you might as well use a more traditional setup and benefit from a system that is fast, simple and robust at the cost of a little one-off editing job.

Linux also includes abundant documentation so that you can always "read the manual" before doing anything you feel unsure about. As with Windows, there are some manuals already on your computer. For example, the original Unix Manual is accessible at any time through the man command; just type man followed by the name of the command you want help on. Using info rather than man provides a more user-friendly version, which often includes additional material such as examples.

In addition, most Linux distributions include Windows-like Help Files or User Guides which you can display when working graphically and navigate by pointing and clicking with your mouse. Even more useful are the documents available on the World Wide Web from sites like the Linux Documentation Project. These include detailed HOW-TOs and user guides on a huge variety of subjects so that you can find out exactly how any particular aspect of Linux works. All this is provided free and gratis by enthusiastic volunteers.

There are also many online forums where you can get help and advice about various aspects of Linux. One good general forum that I can certainly recommend is Linux Forums which has a section specifically for new users ("newbies") and a friendly coffee lounge where you can chat.

Older people are often shy of asking a question in such a forum; we are worried that we will appear stupid and perhaps get told off for "asking silly questions". Yet paradoxically we are more likely to ask sensible questions that do not annoy people and to learn from the answers we get than the average teenager who has been using Windows for years. Linux forums are full of bleats and grumbles from young people who have not really tried to understand what they are doing; they just want a system that will do everything for them as Windows does but without all the worms and viruses.

We older people are more likely to learn as we go along, starting with simple tasks and going on to more complicated things as we gain in confidence and understanding. We are more likely to study the man and info pages too, especially when something unexpected happens. As a result, we can often work out for ourselves where we have gone wrong by entering one or two simple commands and carefully observing the output. And if this does not work and we tentatively post a question in a Linux forum, we are more likely to understand the answer because we have made a point of trying to understand how Linux works. I have found the Linux community to be a friendly place for those who genuinely want to learn.

One important caveat: you cannot run Windows programs directly under Linux. There is a program called wine which provides a Windows-like environment within Linux on which many Windows programs will run but this is a clumsy solution to a problem that does not really exist. Every Windows program that does anything really useful has at least one native Linux equivalent — sometimes several — which do exactly the same thing but often faster, more economically and/or more securely. Here are some suggested equivalents; there are plenty of others.

What about using Linux to connect to the Internet? After all, that's what most people use computers for these days (and for playing games of course but we senior citizens surely have better things than that to do with our time). Here there is both good and bad news. The good news is that with Linux you don't have to worry about all the bad things and the bad guys that are out there. No-one seems to write viruses to run on Linux so you don't need an antivirus program.

There are some Linux worms (which, unlike viruses, do not infect existing programs but run independently and spread from computer to computer by email), but a worm can't do much damage unless you are logged on as root — which you certainly should not be when you're opening email! That is one of the most important differences between Linux and Windows: in Linux only programs run by the root user have privileged access to the system whereas in Windows every program has it. Linux also has a built-in firewall to keep out malevolent people who try to hack into your computer. If you use Windows, you have to obtain a separate firewall package.

The bad news is that not all the devices used to connect to the Internet are compatible with Linux. This is not the fault of Linux; it simply reflects the fact that every piece of hardware needs a program called a driver to operate it, and some hardware manufacturers will neither provide drivers for use with Linux nor reveal enough about how their products are constructed to allow anyone else to do so. They are too much afraid of giving away their trade secrets. In principle, Linux can handle any hardware: it is the antisocial behaviour of these businessmen that gets in the way.

If your computer connects to the Internet via a modem card or network card that is not yet Linux-compatible, you have two choices: spend a few pounds or dollars on a better card and (if necessary) get someone to install it for you or keep a skeleton Windows system running alongside Linux just for Internet access, at least for a while. Most modern hard drives are big enough to contain two operating systems but of course you will then need an antivirus program and a firewall for your online Windows work and you miss out on one of the major benefits of using Linux.

Getting Linux-compatible hardware is definitely the better option; it does not cost much and you only have to do it once. With Windows, you are likely to find yourself having to upgrade your whole computer every few years just to keep up with developments in the software (and don't think you can avoid that by simply sticking to an old version of Windows; Microsoft eventually withdraw all support from old versions and, when they do so, the makers of anti-virus and firewall software do likewise so that people are forced to buy the new ones).

All right, so how do you get hold of Linux, once you've decided to take the plunge? Well, you don't actually have to buy it. If you, or perhaps a friend, have broadband Internet access via Windows, Linux can be downloaded for free from a distribution site such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Burn it onto a bootable CDROM and you can install it from there.

If you don't have even indirect access to broadband or don't know how to make your own CDROM, you can order one to be sent to you by post. The Ubuntu site will send you a free one. Most other sites provide lists of vendors, many of whom will sell you the CDROMs for a few pounds each (little more than the cost of the disc itself plus post and packaging). They can afford to do this because they don't have to pay for the software themselves. They get it by downloading it.

Another very convenient way is to borrow a "Linux Bible" from the computing section of your local public library (they tend to have silly names like Fedora Linux for Dummies or Ubuntu Linux Unleashed). There will be installation CDROMs in the back, ready for you to use. Of course you will eventually have to give them back with the book but you can make your own copies first. Copying Linux is perfectly legal and not piracy because Linux is free software.

If you have a friend who already uses Linux, matters are even simpler; he/she can quite legally copy the installation discs and pass the copies on to you.

Some Linux distributions can be run entirely off a CDROM without changing anything on your computer (so-called live distributions) and they are an excellent way of trying Linux out. Knoppix is probably the best known of these; this site also has a list of vendors. Quite a few other distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and Mepis can be run in this way initially and then, if you wish, installed permanently on your hard drive from the same CDROM.

Linux is the world's best kept secret so if you decide that you like it, please don't keep it to yourself. Tell your friends and contemporaries about it. Lend it to them to try out; remember, it is perfectly legal to copy your installation discs for them. If you are a member of U3A, you could try giving a talk on it. This simple, logical, undemanding operating system, which never crashes or freezes and is immune to most malicious software, could be just what most senior citizens would have secretly preferred their computers to run but didn't know existed.