|
|
Charting the Linux Anatomy:
O'Reilly Describes the Linux System in a Unique
Poster
by Ed Stephenson
|
|
29 January 2001
|
It wasn't until Tim O'Reilly cut a cross section into an
apple that the concept came together. Sitting in the marketing
design department at O'Reilly & Associates one day last year, Tim
picked up an X-Acto Knife and, slicing to the apple's
core, he began to describe how all the disparate components of Linux
fit neatly together. At the center is the kernel, and surrounding it
is the fruit--layer upon layer of utilities and applications that
make the system a viable whole.
After that demonstration, the editorial and marketing design groups moved
ahead, eventually putting in 450 man-hours over a period of eight months for,
of all things, a poster to announce O'Reilly's 2001
Open Source
Software Convention. This was not to be your usual poster. Visually
impressive and loaded with text, the absorbing three-by-three-foot "Anatomy of
a Linux System" doesn't say much about the convention. It does, however, give
viewers a concise and comprehensive look at the
Linux universe. And given how
it evolved, it's an open source poster in more ways than one.
Download a full-size PDF version of the poster (163K).
"I started with the idea that this poster should try to give credit
where credit is due, to help get across just how many people had
contributed to Linux," Tim explains. "It came from a long-held
frustration that the spin being given to Linux, and more specifically
to the GNU heritage of parts of Linux, was blinding people to a much larger
part of the open source story. In particular, I found Richard Stallman's
repeated public claims that it ought to be called GNU/Linux to be
overreaching. Richard is without question the spiritual father of Linux, the
first to articulate the vision of building a complete, free operating system.
But it seems to me that if we were to call it GNU/Linux, we'd have to
call it GNU/Berkeley/MIT/Linux to give credit to even the largest
contributors. Linux is so complex, a river that captures a whole watershed of independent projects. I wanted people to think
more deeply about everything that has come together to create a
free operating system."
 |
|
|
|
Tim [O'Reilly] picked up an X-Acto
Knife and, slicing to the apple's core, he began to describe how all the
disparate components of Linux fit neatly together. |
|
|
|
Why make his case with a poster? Tim was just as interested in the
medium as he was in the message. A couple of years earlier, he had
seen several copies of a System Administration, Networking, and
Security (SANS)
poster on the walls of GMD, the German think tank, even though the
conference it announced had happened two years before. The outdated
marketing message was beside the point because the SANS poster was
also a valuable security road map and information resource for system
and network administrators. Clearly, this was something people would
consult again and again, and keep on their walls long after the event.
It was a vehicle with great potential.
A Cast of Contributors
At first, Tim was alone in his enthusiasm for "information-rich"
posters. Graphic designers at O'Reilly were leery of something so
text-heavy, and the editors didn't seem particularly interested in
tackling a poster. So, knowing that the project first required someone
with technical knowledge and a good idea of the subject matter, Tim
decided to noodle with it himself. Determining the scope of the
content became quite an exercise.
Once you get past the kernel, he reasoned, much of Linux is really
the same aggregation of hundreds of independently developed utilities
that make up the typical Unix system, like the vi editor, and sed and
awk. The participatory history of Unix goes back well before Stallman
and his Free
Software Foundation (FSF) started the GNU project and expressed the need for an open
source operating system.
|
|
|
|
"I started with the idea that this
poster should try to give credit where credit is due, to help get across just
how many people had contributed to Linux." --Tim O'Reilly |
|
|
|
"The GNU project makes up seven percent of the code in a typical Linux
distribution, and some of that was actually contributed by other
projects and reimplemented by the FSF," Tim points out. "A lot of the
BSD (Berkeley Software
Distribution) utilities from 4.4BSDlite were contributed to the FSF after
the AT&T lawsuit in 1994. In fact, so much of the University of
Cailfornia, Berkeley contribution was actually made early on, and incorporated
into every version of Unix, that many
people don't realize this was independently developed 'open source' code.
Folks like Bill Joy, Ken Arnold, Kirk McKusick, and Keith Bostic were all part
of that."
Nor was Berkeley the only source of contributed code. There
was a lot of university participation in the early development of Unix,
and then from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with the
X Window
System. Contributions also came from many commercial entities, such as
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, now Compaq),
Sun Microsystems, and Silicon
Graphics Incorporated
(SGI). And just as important to
the system's evolution were countless other open source projects--including
Apache,
Perl,
Python, and
PHP--that later followed and
became part of a typical Linux distribution as well.
"As I started working on the poster," Tim reflects, "I found that the
issue of who wrote the code was probably less important than getting
across the message that Linux was an umbrella for a whole lot of
projects."
The Gravity Well
How could he express it visually? Tim envisioned something similar to
old encyclopedic cross sections of the earth, showing the core, the
mantel, and the crust. On a large presentation pad, he quickly drew
a big circle, put the Linux kernel in the center, and divided the rest
into quadrants to represent the four audiences that Linux (and not
coincidentally, O'Reilly) serves--programmers, system administrators,
Webmasters, and users. Then he placed various system applications in
quadrants according to use and added a dozen blocks of text around
the circle to describe different tools vital to the system.
But did his design make sense? "He brought in this rather large
two-foot-by-three-foot drawing," recalls Kathryn Heflin, an
art director in O'Reilly's marketing design department.
"Loose words flying all over the page in funny little scrawl and
the semblance of a circle in the middle. I looked at it for about a
week. I thought, my God, I don't understand one thing here."
|
|
|
|
"The hardest part was trying to fit
things together and make sense. You could see where one thing, say Perl, fit in
the Programmer's space, but it also spilled over into the Webmaster space."
--Chuck Toporek |
|
|
|
Yet, once Tim explained his plan with the apple demonstration at lunch that
day, Heflin came up with the key to make the whole thing work. She suggested,
instead, that the Linux system be represented visually as a gravity well: The
kernel would sit in the middle with system applications bound to it in a
series of concentric rings. After numerous studies with fellow designer David
Bacigalupi, Heflin devised a cylindrical-shaped 3-D image with a grid that,
eventually, would contain the names of individual utilities and applications.
Filling in the names was a task taken on by Chuck Toporek and his team from
the O'Reilly Open Source Editorial Group, including Laurie Petrycki, Andy
Oram, and Frank Pohlmann. Toporek not only had to decide what applications to
include but how to arrange them in the drawing. "The hardest part was trying
to fit things together in a way that made sense," he offers. "You
could see where one thing, say Perl, fit in the 'Programmer's' space,
but it also spilled over into the 'Webmaster' space. Realistically, Perl
should've been on a ring of its own, spreading
through the 'System Administrator's' and 'User's' space as well."
It was a demanding puzzle with many variables. Should
Mozilla be next to
Lynx in the 'User's'
quadrant? Which one should be on a
ring closer to the kernel? Opinions changed often as Toporek passed
his latest version in front of his editorial committee, and they had
to be careful that the accompanying blocks of text reflected any new
alignment. After each round of changes, the whole thing went back to
the design group, where Heflin and illustrator Jeff Reynolds added a
color scheme to mirror the one O'Reilly used for its line of
technology books: yellow for security tools, blue for system
administration, green for Web tools, and so on.
Inviting Outside Input
"Our initial hope was to have the poster ready to hand out at our
Open Source Software Convention in Monterey (July 2000), but it wasn't quite
done," Toporek explains. "Instead, we had a draft poster there for
attendees to review."
Heflin printed two versions of the poster-in-progress, one glossy with
color, the other a matte finish without the color field to reveal the
grid. Both were pinned to a bulletin board at the conference so attendees
could "tech-review" the poster by adding items, moving things
around, or suggesting other changes. "We got a lot of useful information
from these folks," Toporek notes, "In the end, I think their input to the
poster was similar to their contributions to open (or free) software
projects. They also helped catch a few errors we made initially, so they
saved us."
Of course, that meant redoing roughly three-quarters of the
illustration, as Heflin expanded it with another ring to accommodate
several new applications. "It took another three months to distill
the changes made at the convention," she recalls, "and we went through
four or five more color evolutions," as they went back and forth with
the editorial group. "In the end," Toporek adds, "I think we probably
went through 20 or so different versions of the design to get it
where it is today."
Don't miss O'Reilly's
Open
Source Software Convention and
Perl Conference 5,
July 23-27, 2001, in San Diego, California.
"Eventually, I had to say 'Enough! Let's run with it,'" Tim remarks.
"As the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once said, 'No book is ever
finished. It is abandoned.' That was certainly true of this poster.
We could have kept working on it for another year, but we wanted to
get it out so that people could start reading it, and hopefully
put it up on their walls."
The result is indeed encyclopedic. Supporting the illustration
are 19 written topics, with brief historical and educational
descriptions of technologies such as Peer-to-Peer Communication,
XML and HTML, Samba, Unix Command-Line Utilities, and even Java.
Each topic has a list of key Web sites and useful books, including
titles that don't belong to O'Reilly--part of Tim's insistence that
the poster serve as a complete Linux resource. The poster also lists
Linux magazines, conferences, major distributors, and, of course, major
contributors.
"Additional comments are certainly welcome because Linux continues
to evolve, as do the resources available to describe it," Tim
comments. "If the poster is popular enough, we'll likely update it.
And in the spirit of open source, I'm certainly willing to give the
'source' to anyone who wants to make their own version of it."
In the meantime, look for "Anatomy of a Linux System" on a wall
near you.
Suggest your own poster contribution
here,
or read what others have to say!
Register to win a free copy of the Anatomy of a Linux System poster!
Twenty-five names will be chosen at random.
Posters are also available free with a $50 purchase at
the following O'Reilly conferences and tradeshows:
O'Reilly Conferences:
Tradeshows:
Return to: linux.oreilly.com
|
