Add some setup and learning content.
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title: "Linux: The Open Operating System"
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date: 2025-01-15
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featureImageCaption: "Photo by <a href=\"https://unsplash.com/@wwarby?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash\">William Warby</a> on <a href=\"https://unsplash.com/photos/a-penguin-is-standing-on-a-rocky-area-mlDxrRUuDxc?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash\">Unsplash</a>"
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summary: "Linux is more than just an operating system; it is a cornerstone of digital self-determination for civil society organizations. This article explores how Linux empowers communities to reclaim control over their technology, ensuring independence, security, and adaptability in an increasingly centralized digital landscape."
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---
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## Operating System?
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Back in the days before every desktop and laptop was sold as a "PC" or an "Apple", and every phone was an "Android" or an "iPhone", people had a better idea of what an "operating system" was. As the tech landscape consolidated around a few dominant players, their brands hid the reality that hardware and software were different things and that users had more than two choices. In fact, today, it is difficult to even find a computer that isn't pre-installed with one of the two dominant operating systems, Windows or macOS.
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{{<alert icon="circle-info">}}
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The **operating** system is the name for the core software that makes individual hardware components of a computer work together, gives the user a way to interact with them, and makes it easy to write and run software applications on top of them. Operating systems make storage drives accessible as folders and files, turns screens into desktops, and allows you to use keyboards and mice to drive things. Operating systems load programs into memory and execute them on purpose-tailored hardware chips like central processing units (CPUs), graphical processing units (GPUs), and neural processing units (NPUs).
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{{</alert>}}
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Apple makes all of their own hardware and they work hard to only allow only _their_ operating system, macOS run on it. Most of the rest of the hardware on the market, though, was created by a bunch of different companies who, in order to and compete, made their hardware more openly, collaborating together to specify standard ways of using and assembling their various components. Before Microsoft there were dozens of different operating systems that worked with this open hardware. Microsoft introduced one of the first text-based operating systems that could run on IBM and Intel hardware in 1982 (MSDOS), and their graphical operating systems (Windows 3.1) in 1993 and, through savvy business and legal positioning came to be the default operating system on over 90% of all personal computers.
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## Linux?
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Even if you're old enough to remember all of this, you might still be surprised that the majority of the world's computers actually __do not__ run Windows or macOS, but some variant of the operating system named Linux. You may be even more surprised to learn that Linux wasn't made by a mega-corporation but freely, as a public good, by a community of developers.
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Richard Stallman organized the project that created Linux (the GNU Project) and the foundation that supported it (the Free Software Foundation) in 1983. Linus Torvalds created the core Linux kernel in 1991. The first "system-ready" version of Linux was released in 1992. Over 200 people contributed to its development and it was almost entirely community-funded.
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Android _is_ a version of Linux. ChromeOS is a version of Linux. Smart TVs use Linux. The vast majority of all computer run on the major cloud providers (Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud, even Microsoft Azure) run Linux. All of the computers that direct Internet around the world run linux. Every single one of the worlds top 500 supercomputers runs Linux. macOS itself, interestingly, shares many of the same underlying technologies as Linux (after Apple gave up on their fully custom OS) and Windows 10 started shipping Linux as part of their OS.
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It's safe to say that Linux powers the world, and, it powers Wild Cloud.
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## Linux for Wild Cloud
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Wild Cloud, at the time of this writing, uses several versions of Linux.
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For your operator machine, we recommend using [Ubuntu Linux](https://ubuntu.com/download). Though the Wild Cloud code may run on other distributions of Linux (especially Debian varieties), and we aim to support multiple distributions in the future, we are currently focused on Ubuntu.
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All of your Wild Cloud's control and worker nodes run Talos Linux. Talos is a minimal, secure Linux distribution designed for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments such as Wild Cloud.
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## Installing Ubuntu
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### On Windows
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If you are running a version of Windows 10 or 11, you can use the [Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about) to run Ubuntu alongside your existing Windows installation. Wild Cloud operation works perfectly fine in WSL.
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To install Ubuntu on WSL, follow these steps:
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1. Open the Microsoft Store and search for "Ubuntu".
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2. Select a recent version of Ubuntu you want to install and click "Install".
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3. Once the installation is complete, launch Ubuntu from the Start menu.
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4. Follow the prompts to set up your new Ubuntu installation.
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### On macOS
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If you are using macOS, you can install Ubuntu in a virtual machine using software like VirtualBox or VMware Fusion. This allows you to run Ubuntu alongside your existing macOS installation.
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To install Ubuntu on a virtual machine, follow these steps:
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1. Download [the Ubuntu ISO](https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop) (a single big file that contains the entire Ubuntu installation) from the official website.
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2. Install [VirtualBox](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) or VMware Fusion on your Mac.
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3. Create a new virtual machine and select the Ubuntu ISO as the installation media.
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4. Follow the prompts to set up your new Ubuntu installation.
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### The best way: just Ubuntu
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Wild Cloud recommends installing Ubuntu directly on a dedicated computer to be your operator machine. This provides the best performance and compatibility for running Wild Cloud operations.
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{{<alert icon="circle-info">}}
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When you install Ubuntu directly on a computer without using WSL or a virtual machine, it's known as installing on "**bare metal**". ⚡
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{{</alert>}}
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You can use just about any desktop or laptop computer made in the last 10 years as your operator machine. You can't install Ubuntu on Apple hardware, though. Just keep in mind you will probably want a lot of disk space for backups of your Wild Cloud either on your operator machine or on an attached external drive.
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To install Ubuntu on a dedicated machine, follow these steps:
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1. Download a recent Ubuntu [ISO from the official website](https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop).
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2. Install [balenaEtcher](https://etcher.balena.io/) following instructions on their website. balenaEtcher will allow you to create a bootable thumb-drive from the Ubuntu ISO file that you can use to install Ubuntu on your operator machine.
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3. Boot the dedicated machine from the USB drive. Many computers will allow you to do this by simply inserting the USB drive and restarting the computer. Some computers are not set to boot from the USB drive, though, so you'll need to access the boot menu (usually by pressing a key like F12, Esc, or Del immediately after turning on the computer) and select the USB drive as the boot device. If you can't figure out how to get to the boot menu, search for your computer model + "boot menu" the the search engine of your choice.
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4. Follow the prompts to install Ubuntu on the dedicated machine. There aren't a ton of options to pick and it usually doesn't take long, maybe a half-hour.
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{{<alert icon="heart" iconColor="red" cardColor="pink">}}
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You will be doing everything to operate your Wild Cloud from your operator machine. Treat yourself and make it a nice one!
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{{</alert>}}
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🛟 Need help with these instructions? Ask questions in the [Wild Cloud forum](https://forum.civilsociety.dev/t/wild-cloud-support/15).
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