Most computer users have had some contact (or a run in) with
Unix, long the dominant operating system for universities,
research labs, and the Internet. However, hardware requirements,
software costs, and Unix's inherently cryptic nature usually put
this OS beyond the reach of home users. In the early 1990s,
Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland and an
international group of volunteers developed a freeware Unix
clone called Linux. Linux has since become widely available to
PC owners, with several thick book/CD-ROM packages on the
shelves of most computer book stores. In 1997, similar versions
of Linux were released for PowerPC-based Macs; this article
discusses my non-expert experience installing and using one of
them: MkLinux. Why Bother? Why would anyone want to run Unix on
a Mac? You can't use Mac applications, and the complicated
command-line interface is as far from the Mac OS as one can get.
Isn't Unix the antithesis of Macintosh? I installed MkLinux to
educate myself about an importan