All About linux

Hi friends,

             I want to share my knowledge about linux and what we won't get from books i.e., what i know in and about the linux.

                  
     Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel. More information on the kernel can be found at our sister site,LinuxHQ and at the official Linux Kernel Archives. 

                         

                         Apart from the fact that it's freely distributed, Linux's functionality, adaptability and robustness, has made it the main alternative for proprietary Unix and Microsoft operating systems.

 We are having two types of Linux they are 

1. Red-hat linux &
2. Debian linux

       These two organisations provide two different linux kernels, but they follow same hierarchy in their design which was derived from Unix Operating System. One best thing in Linux is it is free source operating System so that we can modify our operating system code according to our needs the only linux Operating system provides this flexibility in the world.

       Based on these two types of kernels some organisations developing interface to the kernels. Some of the linux operating systems based on the Red-hat kernel are Fedora,mandriva etc. and Debian kernel operating systems are Ubuntu,Jalicloud.

          These operating systems are free source and we can get those in different ways such as by freely downloading from the internet or by placing a request to get a CD to  our home free of cost. these can be re-burned independent on the count.

              Below are the links to the websites of the linux organisations

• www.fedoraproject.org
• www.ubuntu.com
• www.mandiva.com
• www.jolicloud.com

             Basically Linux is independent on the partition table i.e., whether it can be a MBR or it can GUID partition tables. Linux follows its own directory structure i.e, instead of identifying the directories/partitions  with Labels (C,D,E,F.....) linux uses /,/boot.....i.e.,
          

                  /           indicates root directory (OS installed)

                  /boot   contains the files need to boot the OS so that if we iinstall   windows after installing linux we are ended up booting linux but by using this folder we can boot our linux OS without reinstalling it (i will explain u that in my later posts).

                 /dev     this folder contains the devices information currently our computer holding and managing application links.

                /home   this directory holds Users home folders

                /lib       this folder contains libraries needed to run applications

                /media In this folder our partitioned drives are mounted using the root user authenticaton.

                /mnt     this folder is used to  mount disk images

                /opt      Optional software's are installed in this directory.

                /usr      This is like Program files in windows OS

               

       We know that we can write virus programming in c language but entire linux developed in c & c++ but it doesn't effected by the viruses this is because it not fully Graphical Interfaced or It is not fully command oriented

by using commands for installing the software instead of double clicking on it, we can clearly observe the process which we are running and one more thing is files related to the application to be run are spread  into different folders so it is difficult to identify the library files of an application and to modify it. Linux installed drive cannot be seen in windows or Mac O S X. I forget to explain about the partitions types supported and available in linux like Fat32,NTFS,Mac OSX extended (journeled) are ext2,ext3,ext4,swap.

 those are the file system types linux can be installed. I generally prefer Fedora linux because it provides more number of software's with in the DVD where as in ubundu,jolicloud and mandriva we need to get them from online which are also free of cost.