What is Linux Beginners Level Course: What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system that evolved from a kernel created by Linus Torvalds when he was a student at the University of Helsinki. Generally, it is obvious to most people what Linux is. However, both for political and practical reasons, it needs to be explained further. To say that Linux is an operating system means that it's meant to be used as an alternative to other operating systems, Windows, Mac OS, MS-DOS, Solaris and others. Linux is not a program like a word processor and is not a set of programs like an office suite. Linux is an interface between computer/server hardware, and the programs which run on it. A brief history of Linux When Linus Torvalds was studying at the University of Helsinki, he was using a version of the UNIX operating system called 'Minix'. Linus and other users sent requests for modifications and improvements to Minix's creator, Andrew Tanenbaum, but he felt that they weren't necessary. That's when Linus decided to create his own operating system that would take into account users' comments and suggestions for improvements. Free Software pre-Linux This philosophy of asking for users' comments and suggestions and using them to improve computer programs was not new. Richard Stallman, who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been advocating just such an approach to computer programming and use since the early 1970's. He was a pioneer in the concept of 'free software', always pointing out that 'free' means 'freedom', not zero cost. Finding it difficult to continue working under conditions that he felt went against his concept of 'free software' he left MIT in 1984 and founded GNU. The goal of GNU was to produce software that was free to use, distribute and modify. Linus Torvalds' goal 6 years later was basically the same: to produce an operating system that took into account user feedback. The kernel We should point out here that the focal point of any operating system is its 'kernel'. Without going into great detail, the kernel is what tells the big chip that controls your computer to do what you want the program that you're using to do. To use a metaphor, if you go to your favorite Italian restaurant and order 'Spaghetti alla Bolognese', this dish is like your operating system. There are a lot of things that go into making that dish like pasta, tomato sauce, meatballs and cheese. Well, the kernel is like the pasta. Without pasta, that dish doesn't exist. You might as well find some bread and make a sandwich. A plate of just pasta is fairly unappetizing. Without a kernel, an operating system doesn't exist. Without programs, a kernel is useless. 1991, a fateful year In 1991, ideal conditions existed that would create Linux. In essence, Linus Torvalds had a kernel but no programs of his own, Richard Stallman and GNU had programs but no working kernel. Read the two men's own words about this: Linus: Sadly, a kernel by itself gets you nowhere. To get a working system you need a shell, compilers, a library etc. RMS: The GNU Hurd is not ready for production use. Fortunately, another kernel is available. [It is called] Linux.So combining the necessary programs provided by GNU in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a kernel, developed by Linus Torvalds in Helsinki, Finland, Linux was born. Due to the physical distances involved, the means used to get Linus' kernel together with the GNU programs was the Internet, then in its infancy. We can say then that Linux is an operating system that came to life on the Internet. The Internet would also be crucial in Linux's subsequent development as the means of coordinating the work of all the developers that have made Linux into what it is today. Linux is introduced Late in 1991, Linus Torvalds had his kernel and a few GNU programs wrapped around it so it would work well enough to show other people what he had done. And that's what he did. The first people to see Linux knew that Linus was on to something. At this point, though, he needed more people to help him. Here's what Linus had to say back in 1991. Linus: Are you without a nice project and dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs?... This post might just be for you. People all over the world decided to take him up on it. At first, only people with extensive computer programming knowledge would be able to do anything with that early public version of Linux. These people started to offer their help. The version numbers of Linux were getting higher and higher. People began writing programs specifically to be run under Linux. Developers began writing drivers so different video cards, sound cards and other gadgets inside and outside your computer could use Linux. Nevertheless, throughout most of first part of the 1990's Linux did not get out of the 'GURU' stage. GURU is a term that has evolved to mean anyone who has special expertise in a particular subject. That is, you had to have special expertise in how computers worked to be able to install Linux in those days. Linux, at first, not for everybody Other popular software companies sold you a CD or a set of floppies and a brief instruction booklet and in probably less than a half an hour, you could install a fully working operating system on your PC. The only ability you needed was knowing how to read. Those companies had that intention when they actually sat down and developed their operating systems. Linus Torvalds didn't have that in mind when he developed Linux. It was just a hobby for him. Later on, companies like Red Hat made it their goal to bring Linux to the point where it could be installed just like any other operating system; by anyone who can follow a set of simple instructions, and they have succeeded. For some reason, though, Linux hasn't completely lost its 'Gurus only' image. This is largely because of the popular tech press' inability to explain in a meaningful way what Linux is. The truth is that few tech reporters have real life experience with Linux and it is reflected in their writing. Where Linux is Today Today, Linux is enjoying a favorable press for the most part. This comes from the fact that Linux has proven to be a tremendously stable and versatile operating system, particularly as a network server. When Linux is deployed as a web server or in corporate networks, its down-time is almost negligible. There have been cases when Linux servers have been running for more than a year without re-booting and then only taken down for a brief period for routine maintenance. Its cost effectiveness has sold it more than anything else. Linux can be installed on a home PC as well as a network server for a fraction of the cost of other companies' software packages. More reliability and less cost - it's ideal. If you're reading this, you're obviously here to learn how to use Linux. Any learning experience means opening up to new ideas and new ways of doing things. As mentioned before, Linux is in the UNIX family of operating systems. UNIX is primarily designed to be used by professionals. You will have to learn some UNIX concepts in this lesson, but that doesn't mean that Linux is a professionals-only operating system. In fact, most major versions of Linux are designed to be as user-friendly and as easy to install as any other operating system on the market today.

Now that you know what Linux is and how good it is, there's one more thing we have to do - install Linux! http://www.linux.org/article/view/what-is-linux What Type of Installation Beginners Level Course: What Type of Installation What type of installation should I do? (Dual Boot / Live CD / Fresh Install / Virtual Installation) One of the things that makes Linux special is that it can play nice with other operating systems. You can run Linux alongside of other operating systems quite easily. The most popular installation process for installing Linux is to install a Fresh Installation of Linux with no other operating system in place. This allows the computer to dedicated 100% of its resources to running Linux. However, it is quite easy to install Linux as a one of a series of operating systems that a computer has available to it. Here are the most popular ways to install/run Linux on your computer Dual Booting - If you want to keep an existing operating system, and install Linux as well, you will have what is known as a "dual-boot" system. That means that you have a PC that can use two different operating systems, and during the boot process you will need to decide which one you would like to boot into. Authors Note: Dual Booting between Windows and Linux is becoming somewhat less popular due to the rise of Virtual Machines. If you like the idea of running two operating systems, then you may want to consider running Linux as a VM inside of another operating system instead. Live CD/DVD Booting Linux If you are just looking to try Linux out to see if you like it, but don't want to commit to wiping out your main operating system, you may want to consider trying Linux from a "Live CD/DVD". Many Linux installations provide the option of downloading and running Linux as a "Live CD", which means that Linux runs as a completely bootable operating system from the CD/DVD. The files are loaded into your computers memory, rather than being run for a hard disk drive. In layman's terms, this means that you can run Linux from a CD/DVD, and then when you reboot your PC, and remove the CD/DVD, it will boot back into its old operating system without any difference to your PC. This gives you an easy way to try out several distributions of Linux until you find the one that you like! Using a "Live CD/DVD" is also a popular method of rescuing files from a corrupted operating system, more on this later... Linux as a VM inside another Operating System If you like your current (non-linux) desktop operating system, but would like an easy way to access a Linux desktop or run your favorite open source software, you may want to consider running Linux as a VM inside another operating system. There are a number of ways to do this, but one simple one would be to download and install a Virtual Server application, and then install your Linux distribution under that host software. This topic is covered in the more advanced tutorials on this website I think that I should pause here and say that everything that you can do with your other operating system, you can do with Linux. That means word processing, databases, spreadsheets, Internet browsers, e-mail, photo touch-ups, MP3, CD Players, cameras and then there are a lot of things that Linux has to offer on top of all that that other operating systems don't. Fresh Install of Linux This method is by far the most popular installation method available. In this approach, you take the plunge and format your computers hard drive and install Linux from a CD/DVD. Linux then runs as your computers only operating system. http://www.linux.org/article/view/what-type-of-installation Introduction To Linux Beginners Level Course: Introduction To Linux Welcome to Linux.org's "Getting Started with Linux: Beginner Level Course". If you're new to Linux and want to find out how to use the fastest growing operating system today, all you have to do is follow these lessons and you'll be using Linux efficiently in no time. Getting Started with Linux: Beginner Level Course is designed as a self-study course. One of the things that makes this course unique is that at any point during a course, you can add a note, or comment. This is done in the comments bar on the right hand side of the screen. These comments can be made public or private, and can take any form that you like. Feel free to use them to ask questions, answer other users questions, post code updates, or suggest different methodologies for solving problems. Linux is a very popular operating system, and this course is followed by thousands of people each day. Due to this, there are a lot of people online who are also in the process of learning it. So please feel free to ask any questions that you have and someone in the Linux Community will probably answer you! Also, this whole site, including the courses are regularly moderated. If you don't get an answer to a question, we will do our best to answer it for you. In addition, please send us your suggestions for how we can improve the courses, any typos that you have noticed, or any errors that you have encountered.. If you're ready to start learning about Linux, you may start at our table of contents or you may want to jump right into lesson one [What Is Linux?]. http://www.linux.org/article/view/introduction-to-linux Distro: Fedora WHAT IS FEDORA? Fedora is a Linux-based operating system, a collection of software that makes your computer run. You can use Fedora in addition to, or instead of, other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. The Fedora operating system is completely free of cost for you to enjoy and share. The Fedora Project is the name of a worldwide community of people who love, use, and build free software. We want to lead in the creation and spread of free code and content by working together as a community. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, the world's most trusted provider of open source technology. Red Hat invests in Fedora to encourage collaboration and incubate innovative new free software technologies. WHAT MAKES FEDORA DIFFERENT?We believe in the value of free software, and fight to protect and promote solutions anyone can use and redistribute. Not only is the Fedora operating system made from free software, but we use free software exclusively to provide it to you. This web site, in fact, is made from free software and serves millions of people every month. We also believe in the power of collaboration. Our developers work with free software project teams around the world we call "upstream." They create much of the software found in Fedora. We collaborate closely with them so everyone can benefit from our work, and get access to

improvements as soon as possible. By working in the same direction as these project teams, we can ensure that free software works better together, and provides the best experience for users. We also can include improvements quickly, which helps not only users, but the upstream as well. We also believe in empowering others to pursue their own visions of a free operating system. Anyone can remix Fedora into a new product with a new name. We even provide the tools in Fedora itself. In fact, Fedora is already the foundation for derivatives such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the One Laptop Per Child XO, and the Creative Commons Live Content DVDs. WHAT ARE FEDORA'S CORE VALUES?The four foundations of freedom, features, friends, and first are the core values of the Fedora community. Read more about them below.

Freedom We believe we should use and distribute the software and content we promote to accomplish our mission of advancing free software. We provide free alternatives to proprietary code and content to make Fedora completely free and redistributable for everyone. That way, anyone can use any of our work for their own purposes, without legal hassles, to further spread free software.

Friends We believe success comes from a strong community, made of people from around the world, working together. There's a place in Fedora foranyone who supports our values and wants to help. By collaborating with each other openly and transparently, and with a strong, supportive partnership with our sponsors, we can achieve great things.

Features We believe the hard work of creating new technical features makes free software more powerful, flexible, and useful for millions of people. We don't mind shaking up the status quo, when it means we can more effectively move free software forward. And we do it by collaborating directly with the many software communities whose work is distributed by Fedora. That way everyone benefits, regardless of whether they use Fedora or not.

First We believe in the power of innovation and showing off new work in our releases. Since we release twice a year, you never have to wait long to see the latest and greatest software, while there are other Linux products derived from Fedora you can use for long-term stability. We always keep Fedora moving forward so that you can see the future first. http://www.linux.org/article/view/distro-fedora Starting An Actual Installation Configure Your PC to Boot from the CD/DVD drive Partitioning Hard Drives In Linux Beginners Level Course: Starting An Actual Installation Plunk that CD/DVD in the drive! Okay. Now is the moment of truth. We've got the CD in the drive, and we're ready to go. Restart the computer. This should now boot the Linux kernel located on your CD ROM. What you'll have to do first is partition the hard drive. There is an easy way to do this. You can dedicate the whole hard disk or non-Windows partition (depending on the type of install you're doing). There is a better alternative. That is to partition your hard disk even further and put "parts" of Linux on separate partitions. For example, this is the scheme that works for me: Let's take a 10 gigabyte hard drive as an example. First, you should see how much RAM you have. From this figure, you create what's known as a SWAP partition. This is simply a way that Linux uses to get an extra memory boost. Custom dictates that your swap partition be double your ram

memory. So if you've got 256 megabytes of RAM, the feel free to make a 500 megabyte swap partition. Then my partition scheme ends up looking like this:

Partition swap / (boot) /usr /home

Location /dev/hda2 /dev/hda1 /dev/hda3 /dev/hda4

Size 500 mb 1.2 gb 3.5 gb 5 gb

Assign partitions to look like this. Don't worry about the /usr and /home parts. That will come after. You must indicate here that you want / to be the bootable partition. /usr will contain most of the programs that will run on your machine. /home will contain your personal files. This kind of a partition scheme may come in handy if you have problems with your hard disk. You may be able to save information if it's located in different partitions easier than if it were only one big partition. Before we actually assign the other partitions their places and functions, we need to initialize and activate a the swap partition. Do this now. Now you should initialize the / partition - the one that will boot the Linux kernel. http://www.linux.org/article/view/starting-an-actual-installation Reference ALL: http://www.linux.org/ Distro: CentOS

"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor's redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free. CentOS is developed by a small but growing team of core developers. In turn the core developers are supported by an active user community including system administrators, network administrators, enterprise users, managers, core Linux contributors and Linux enthusiasts from around the world. CentOS has numerous advantages over some of the other clone projects including: an active and growing user community, quickly rebuilt, tested, and QA'ed errata packages, an extensive mirror network, developers who are contactable and responsive, multiple free support avenues including IRC Chat, Mailing Lists, Forums, a dynamic FAQ." [1] http://www.linux.org/article/view/distro-centos Hiren's BootCD

Developer(s)

Hiren

Stable release

15.1 / 10 December 2011; 6 months ago

License

Freeware

Website

hiren.info/bootcd

Hiren's BootCD[1][2][3] (also known as HBCD) is a bootable software CD containing a number of diagnostic programs such as partitioning agents, system performance benchmarks, disk cloning and imaging tools, data recovery tools, MBR tools, BIOS tools, and many others for fixing various computer problems. Many people consider HBCD an invaluable tool [4] for use in troubleshooting and recovery of computers; however, due to a questionable past, it has received little press. As it is bootable, the operating system of the computer need not be available for the tools to be usable. All that is required is that the computer is able to run Microsoft Windows and Linux (but it does not have to have either of these installed at the time of use). Some of the tools are also available when the operating system is already started. Contents [hide]

1 Distribution 2 History

2.1 Licensing issues

3 See Also 4 References 5 External links

[edit]Distribution Hiren's BootCD [5] is available as an ISO image zipped together with other information such as its changelog. The image file can be burned to aCD or onto a USB flash drive for use on computers that support booting from USB. [edit]History Hiren's BootCD was created by "Hiren" & "Pankaj" and is based on Knoppix (a bootable Linux operating system) and a collection of other freeware tools. It has found some controversial stigma as a "hacker" tool violating copyright. However, today the majority of its software is freeware or shareware. [edit]Licensing issues Prior to version 11.0, Hiren's BootCD contained a significant number of commercial products. In version 10.6[6], no fewer than 17 were listed in the release notes. Most notably Acronis True Image,Norton Ghost, Acronis Disk Director, and Paragon Partition Manager. (Partition Magic Pro had been replaced already in version 10.5.) To be able to start a commercial application, the user had to promise to be the holder of a license, but no validation of this statement was ever made. In version 11.0 [7], only three remained: 1. 2. 3. Mini Windows 98 Mini Windows XP A collection of MS DOS utilities

The assumption was most likely that anyone using the tools would have a license for these products. Whether or not that would stand up in court is another matter. In later revisions, Mini Windows 98 was removed, leaving only two commercial products on the CD. In version 15.0, an installation of Windows 7 was added to the disc alongside the previously existing Mini Windows XP. As a response to this, so-called "restored editions" of the HBCD have begun to appear soon after the official releases. In addition to the officially released software, these also contain the commercial products present before version 11.0.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiren's_BootCD