JCN's Linux Distros of Israel Page & Something About Me

Jewish Celiacs Newsletter (JCN) is about helping people with Celiac Disease and about finding Kosher food that's "gluten-free" every day. "Kosher" for religious reasons and "Gluten-Free" for health reasons!

I have always had a deep interest in Jewish causes, or other causes that deeply affected the Jewish people and Israel. Jews have always needed a safe and secure place in which to live ever since Abraham ben Terah left out of Ur Chazdeem and headed for HaEretz Yisrael, the "Promised Land" with his family and flock. Anyone like myself who has studied Jewish history from the T'nach (the Jewish Bible) to the Holocaust era and on to the refounding of Yisrael on Iyar 5, 5708 (May 14, 1948) and beyond that time, knows that safety and security is number one with us outside of HaShem, the Creator. It's an ongoing theme that seems to reach a crisis point every five minutes. There are no vacations to be had, but giving up is not and never was an option to those who cared about living.

Finding and being able to own and operate a PC (personal computer) with a good, stable, secure and easy-to-use operating system, or OS, is a must too. Linux, or as some would say, GNU/Linux, an offshoot of Unix, which has been powering the Internet before Bill Gates, DOS and Windows came on the scene, is one of my vital interests. The ability to make this online newsletter and my paper edition, which comes out every four months, is due to being able to use a computer, thank G-d. Although I, as I will mention later, use Windows for most things, and I do so out of necessity right now, I would rather use Linux, the "free" (as in freedom, but also as in $$$) operating system.

There are a number of Jewish software programs, Jewish-owned software companies, Jewish-run and Jewish-owned web sites as well as Jewish, or Israeli-founded, "Free," or "Open Source," operating systems that are based on some "flavor" of Linux. At present, there are three Israeli-based Linux distros, or distributions, that deserve my mention and support though I personally do not use all three, but only one, StartCom Linux.

DistroWatch lists four Israeli-based ones that produce GNU/Linux distros with the the i386, i486, i586, i686 and x86_64 architectures, but I found that there are really only three. Fermi Linux, listed as number 2, is named after the Italian, Jewish scientist, Enrico Fermi, but that's where it ends. Fermi Linux LTS (Long Term Support) is a site distribution based on Scientific Linux. According to Wikipedia, "Scientific Linux is an open source free GNU/Linux distribution, co-developed by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and which aims to be 100% compatible with and based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux." Red Hat and Debian were some of the earliest Linux distros. Fermi Linux and Scientific Linux are not one and the same as far as I have discovered.

Many people have, and most still do use, the Microsoft Windows operating system, which has included Windows 2.0x, 3.0x, 95, 98 and 98SE, ME, NT, XP and now Vista, at home, or at work. Others use Apple's MAC, now-a-days referred to as MAC OS/X, however, there has been an ever-growing number of people who are now using the GNU/Linux OS at home too! Linux servers power some of the largest companies in the world as well. If you would like to know more about Linux (GNU/Linux), including the history of Linux, which includes the many Jews who had a hand in making Linux great, you can go to the following web sites under the heading, LINUX ONLINE at the bottom of this page. BTW, Jewish Celiacs Newsletter is run on top of a Linux server at BlueHost.

My Involvement In Linux

I have always had an interest in writing, editing and publishing that goes back to the time that I was in the Air Force in the early 1960s. I had no formal training as a writer, or as a jounalist, but I strongly believe in "on-the-job-training." My first experience with a modern (electric) typewiter was with an IBM Selectric that I had used at the Distant Drummer newspaper. I headed the transportation, distribution, and later the advertising and layout departments of the D.D. in the late 1960s. I also wrote columns on jazz and theater, covered some news stories and published my own poetry in the Drummer and in other so-called Underground Presses all around the U.S and in Belgium.

After leaving the paper because the editor, Don D'Maio, had given my hard-earned work as Advertising Director to some woman without discussing anything with me in advance, I moved on to the Philadelphia Free Press. There, I did some book and music reviews and little else amongst the hard-nosed Leftists who had sought to change the world overnight with the help of Chairman Mao's little "Red Book." I was able to put together my own art supplement for the paper, which I had named Bloodstream, but it wasn't much appreciated by the politically-minded staff except by the Jewish ones. Furthermore, most of the paper's audience were really focused on bringing about a Marxist, Maoist, Socialist world in America, which was not my bag. They were not into digging true, non-commercial art, which told me who they really were! Those bourgeoisie-like jokers who fancied themselves "revolutionaries" often tried to get this working class man to accept their shtick. What chutzpah!

Anyway, this was after the 1967, Six Day War, which found the Jews of Israel, the Israelis, to be a winner, which not only annoyed the Arab and Islamic world, but their supporters on the Left as well, which included many self-hating, or misguided Jews, who feared the goyim, or non-Jewish nations, of the world more than they feared the wrath of G-d. Many still do in these post 9/11 times! May G-d help us!

By the early-mid 1970s, I had begun my theater company, Nefesh (Jewish Theater), and later Kolote Shel Ayshe (the International Jewish Art Journal). I researched and typed up everything for K.S.A. before it was given to a professional typist to type the copy for layout. I had paid her pretty well and she did a great job. I then proof read it and she made any corrections that had to be done. I then laid out the final copy on story boards, or sheets, pasted it up, and delivered it to Bartash Printers in West Philly. My late friend, Alan Hausner, who had created computer art with Jewish themes on his MAC by the late 1970s had earlier given me his old Remington typewriter to type up K.S.A. He was one of my best supporters. He had driven me to pick up K.S.A. and I hand-delivered it to 119 stops in Philadelphia and New York City by bus, train and on foot. I was Chief Cook and Bottle Washer back then. I'll never forget that. In the 1980s, I created Mazahl, which was about Sidereal Astrology, Macrobiotics and Avant-Garde Jazz. Mazahl was my first newsletter. K.S.A. was an actual tabloid. I followed Mazahl in the late 1980s with The Open Mind for avant-garde music and I included some information on macrobiotics and organic food in that short-lived publication.

During the Summer of 1980, I had the misfortune to be homeless and lived on the streets of Philly until about January 1981 when I was jailed for not having a place to stay. After having been released, I hitch-hiked to Baltimoe where I again was jailed, but not before I was beaten and robbed by Black thugs accross the street from a Baltimore, MD police station at 6 AM, the day I had arrived in town. After a series of mishaps, which consisted of being robbed again, I decided to leave Baltimore. On the road, I entered a building to get some information just outside of the city, and two cops came in, grabbed me, handcuffed me and took me to jail, saying that I was being held for robbery. After being held for a few days, the cops took me to a mental institution where I was roughed up by Black, ward boys for not taking their damned meds. That was about March 1981. I had spent time in jail in Baltimore on bum charges and was forced to take drugs by the stinkin' pigs who ran the damned institution from March 1981 until the end of August 1981. I managed to contact my late, friend, Steve Jacobs, who promised the heads of the institution that he would be responsible for me and I arrived back in Philadelphia in early September 1981 where I was forced to stay at the YMCA on Arch Street. Do I understand Lenny Bruce? I sure do, but it was never funny to me though he used to crack me up.

It was then, back in Philly, that I began to get back to photography, music and writing. Another, late, friend and my music partner, Bill Lewis, and I, began doing gigs and planning for the future with Bill Lewis & US (The Contemporary Music Society). I also tried to revive the Empty Foxhole, which I had created in the 1960s to showcase avant-garde jazz. The Foxhole lasted for about fifteen years at St. Mary's Church. I guess most people think that the idea for the E.F. had come from Eugene "Geno" Barnhardt." Not Really!!! I had given charge of it to him when I was working on "Bloodstream." He and I had fallen out and parted ways. He held my 33.1/3 rpm jazz records hostage (stole them) and I couldn't find a way to get them back for years. He also renamed the Empty Foxhole to 'Geno's Empty Foxhole.' In retrospect, he was nothing but another "pig!" When Bill and I ran into Geno in the 1980s, Bill convinced Geno to join him and me in order to restart thr Foxhole. Geno returned most of my LPs, but he soon ODed on booze and his meds and croaked. Bill and I held a Foxhole Revival to buy him a headstone, and after the concert, we discovered that he had been cremated by the State of Pennsylvania. Nu? Life is full of damned surprises.

I used my Commodore 64 computer to make signs and tickets for gigs and I even wrote a tune with a computer, piano keyboard, attachment to it. Bill Lewis arranged my "masterpiece" for our five-piece group to play in public. I called it "My First Tune." I played it out on the keyboard as an up tempo piece and Bill slowed it down to where it sounded like a funeral dirge. He then wrote an arrangement for the band and we performed it to my liking. I dug it, so we recorded it on tape. In fact, we had made many tapes. One, we sold to the public. I named it "What's New, Is Old." The Commodore 64 debuted in January 1982 and the Timex-Sinclair's Sinclair 1000, also known as the Sinclair ZX81, was introduced in Great Britain in March 1981, but came out later, in July 1982. I bought the latter one for only $49.95 at K-Mart, played with it for a few weeks until it malfunctioned on a chess module that I had paid extra for at move 62, and I had to return it for a Commodore 64 computer. I also bought the C-64 at K-Mart for somewhere between $149 and $199. I had it for years and I really got my money's worth from it. It had paid for itself.

I joined PACS (Philadelphia Area Computer Society) at LaSalle College in the Fall of 1982 and signed up for the Commodore SIG (Special Interest Group) where I learned a lot from people like my, late friend, Henry Stolinsky, who jokingly called me "turkey," may he rest in peace. I learned about databases and elementary programing from him, but I was more interested in HTML, CSS and PHP, which I would eventually use to make web pages. I finally got into that when I left the Commodore SIG to try my hand at the OS/2 operating system, OS, and later with GNU/Linux OS by around 1992. While with the Commodore SIG, I formed Commodore GEOS, a sub-SIG of Commodore. I held meetings after the main group was through with their gathering. My secretary was Bill Bacon who wrote up our notes for the monthly PACS DataBus magazine, something that I had done for the Commodore SIG for several years in a row before that time. I began to show others how to use a GEOS word processor, spreadsheet and a database, and I had made some money doing astrology charts and interpretations, making greeting cards, flyers and much more. I did more than play games and send e-mails.

Commodore was founded by a Holocaust survivor named Jack Tramiel who was born in 1928 in Lódz, Poland, as Idek Trzmiel. Lódz was where my late father had come from in the 1930s to escape the NAZIs. According to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, "At one point (1983/84/85), the Commodore 64 dominated the market with approximately 40% share, even outselling IBM PCs and Apple computers." A Holocaust survivor, Jack Tramiel had been forced to live in a ghetto with his family after 1939, then they were "sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp... [where he was] examined by Dr. Mengele and selected for a work party..." and lived to be later "rescued from the work camp in April 1945 by the U.S. Army." It's quite ironic that Tramiel, a Holocaust victim, and his company, Commodore, managed to beat out IBM, a rival PC company that had ealier, under Thomas J. Watson, worked hand in hand with the Third Reich to round up millions of Jews and others using "IBM's Hollerith punch card technology." This is according to award winning author Edwin Black in his book, "IBM & The Holocaust." (See the book to the left.) Tramiel, a survivor, beating out IBM, a Nazi collaborator, was music to my ears!!! "Only with IBM's technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany's war against the Jews -- how did Hitler get the names?" I had the pleasure of doing some research for one of Mr. Black's books in the early part of this century while I was an Administrator for the Holocaust Awareness Museum, founded by another late friend and educator, Yaakov Riz. His museum was the first Holocaust museum in America.

According to the DataBook For OS/2 by David Both, "In 1984, IBM introduced the PC-AT which was the first (IBM) PC to use the new Intel 80286 processor." David Both, "At this time, the IBM PC was the responsibility of Entry Systems Division (ESD). ESD was also working closely with Microsoft to produce OS/2. During this time, Microsoft was also working on the first versions of Windows, and IBM was working on a product called TopView which was a DOS add-on that allowed text mode multitasking. Most people do not remember TopView, but it was a good product and I used it between 1984 and 1987 when OS/2 1.00 was released."

Windows 1.0 was a 16-bit graphical operating environment released on November 20, 1985, but I hadn't really gotten into it until Windows 3.0 and the followup 3.1 and the 3.1.1 For Workgroups release that came out after that one. Before then, I had used MS DOS 3 to 5. MS-DOS was originally released in 1981. Windows 95 followed 3.0 and 3.11 and was a consumer-oriented, graphical user interface-based operating system that was released on August 24, 1995 before which time I had started going to the PACS OS/2 SIG. OS/2 had been half-heartedly supported by IBM, which is now one of many big companies that supports Linux. Free code. After learning of IBM's involvement with the Holocaust, I steered clear of their products as much as possible. Even Microsoft, which used to wotk with IBM, now has a certain interest in Linux. It seems like free "slave-like" labor that is afforded by Linux volunteers brings big bucks to the big, greedly corporations who profess a real interest in Linux. What's new? When I moved away from MS 3.1.1, I went to OS/2, but was eventually disappointed in it because of where they were heading, etc. I then discovered the PACS Linux SIG, not wanting to be caught up in Windows 95. However, I later had to return to Windows out of neccessity. Linux really wasn't ready for Prime Time in 1994 and it wasn't even an option for small business until many years later though I still tried my hand at Linux all these years.

StartCom Linux Desktop

Doing it with Linux distros:- I joined the Linux SIG, which was headed by Chris Fearnly who now-a-days is not so Jew-friendly from what I've read by him on his web site, but that is now. Then, he seemed to have no anti-Semitic traits about him. In order to give the group more time to meet, I started an off campus group that I called PLUG (Philadelphia Linux Users Group) at the Highwire Gallery on 2nd Street between Market and Vine Streets. Chris and most of the others knew more than I did about Linux and writing code. I limited my function to calling the meetings to order every week and asking lots of questions of the geeks and the nerds instead. It doesn't hurt to hang around people who know more than you. After all, there's much to know when it comes to computing, or even building your own PC box, or creating your own web sites and trying to hold it all together so it doesn't lock up and crash.

Ehad Linux Logo

I tried my hand at many [Linux] distros, or distributions, such as Yggdrasil, Caldera, Red Hat 7 and 9 in the early days, but I must admit that it wasn't a piece of cake. I got the majority of my work done using Windows, or Windoze, as some Linux heads like to call it, because it had the super duper apps (applications), or programs, and in many ways it still does; ones like MS Publisher, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Dreamweaver and other "proprietary" apps, which you must buy and agree to not tinker with, or make copies of to give away, or sell, to anyone without checking in with the software company first. I don't mind paying for something that works, but to have to wait and wait for fixes and updates when something better and more stable comes along and then because you must get a job done, you have to go out and buy another app that is pretty much like it until it needs an update, makes me damned mad!!! It is a rip-off. The entire attitude behind propreitary software eats it though "Open Source," or "Free" software (not ripped-off programs) leaves lots to be desired. In the long run, and I know this sounds like Socialism, which in reality sucks if you have at least half a brain, "Open Source," or "Free," is more trustworthy.

Kinneret Linux Desktop

Linux, or GNU/Linux, is free to download, free to remake and improve on (you must include all the code for others to work on), free to copy and give away and even to sell on a CD, or DVD. You have to make it clear that you are selling the CD, or the DVD, and not the OS, Linux. This method has a better chance of preventing back doors to software programs that any government, or criminal organization, behind proprietary software, can put into your operating system like the Windows OS can in order to spy on you, creating malware with viruses and more like Trojan horses and web bugs. Linux stands a better chance of protecting your privacy that Big Bad Bill's Vista machine, or XP before it.

Linux, Linux, Linux:- Get involved with Linux as much as you can until you feel confident enough to drop Gate's nightmare and you can operate a Linux distro like PCLinuxOS, or Puppy, but if you really want to support Israel too, try any of the three distros below. I like StartCom Linux. I'm using StartCom MultiMedia Edition 5.0.6 (Kessem) right now, as of 2007-11-14, and the word from the horse's mouth to me via an e-mail is that the current "2.6.23" Linux kernal should soon replace the "2.6.16" Linux kernel in StartCom MultiMedia Edition 5.0.6 (Kessem). The kernel is the core of the GNU/Linux OS in case you do not know. Now, on to the Linux distros below. Have fun. Support Linux! Support Israel.