Linux Community Magazine

How I Went From Angry Windows User To Delighted Linux User In Ten Minutes!

About 18 months ago, I had another disastrous crash on my PC that caused me to loose a host of photos, music and documents. Luckily I had a backup of most of my documents on an external disk. So I wasn't too concerned by this. I had experienced many crashes on Windows before and usually I was able to recover most of my documents and restore the system back to normal without too much effort.

This time was different however and to my horror, I discovered that Windows had somehow corrupted my external disk as well. I had lost everything and was pretty angry about it.

I tried a number of data recovery programs but most of the files wore gone. Forever. What a disaster!

At that point I decided that I would look for another alternative to windows and I thought I would give Linux another try.A few years earlier I had experimented with RedHat Linux but had no real success with it as it had problems detecting my usb keyboard and mouse. Which was obviously a bit of a non-starter for me. I knew that big advances were being made in the Linux world so I decided to do a bit of research.

Linux is an operating system that is free. That is, it can be downloaded and copied and distributed without a fee. It is free in a deeper sense too. Most of the software is written under a license called the "GPL" which effectively means that source code is available to everyone for each and every component of the Linux Operating System. If you have access to the source code for a piece of software then you can change the program to fix bugs and make it better. Once you do this you are under obligation to make your new source code available to others.

This has worked extremely well and Linux is being developed by programmers all over the world to make it better and better. The progress is amazing!

In my research I discovered a website: This website keeps a list of the most popular distributions of Linux. A distribution is a collection of Linux software that together makes an operating system. Each distribution contains different software and has a different focus. There are so many to try... Fedora, Mandrake, Puppy, PCLinuxOS, Debian, Knoppix, and the most popular, Ubuntu Linux. I downloaded the ISO of Ubuntu Linux from the Ubuntu website / and burned it to cd (an ISO file is cd image that can be recreated using a cd burning tool such as Nero).I placed the cd in my drive and booted up my computer.

I was astounded!

Within 10 minutes my computer was running Ubuntu Linux without even having to install it! This was a "Live-CD" and it can be used without installing to hard disk - it can be run from a cd without affecting your computer at all.

All my hardware was detected and within minutes I was surfing the web using Firefox and getting my email using Evolution, chatting to friends in messenger and yahoo chat using Gaim, writing documents and opening spreadsheets in Open Office and listening to Internet Radio with RythmBox.

I was delighted with the easy to use and gorgeous looking desktop. I decided to install it straight away and since then I haven't looked back.

There is an abundance of free open source software just waiting for you to experience. The package management system - Synaptic, allows you to search repositories of software and download them. The quality of a lot of the software is incredible.

Linux is written from the ground up to be a secure operating system. This means that you won't have to worry about getting viruses, spyware or any other kind of malware. My system is as stable as a rock. Of course, there are downsides to running Linux. The main one is that there is a learning curve that can be quite steep. It is not windows so If you are trying to get something working, your windows knowledge will not help you.

You might need to troubleshoot problems using the Command Line Interface - similar to windows DOS, but many times more powerful. Fortunately, help is at hand on the incredibly friendly and helpful forums at

I have been running Ubuntu Linux now for 18 months and can't see any reason now to return to windows. Once you get past the mind set of using closed source software a whole new world opens up before you and you realise that amazing things are possible with linux.

I hope you found this article helpful and I hope it inspires you to try out Ubuntu Linux as I did. You won't regret trying it.

Here are some resources:

Distrowatch - News on the latest Linux distributions.

Ubuntu - Download the Ubuntu Linux operating system for your computer

Forums - Go here for help and advice

/wiki/LinuxLinux on Wikipedia

At the rate with which the IT industry is growing, a large number of people see this as an extremely lucrative career option. Computer hardware and networking has become an area of great scope and a large number of people are generously pursuing this course. India needs its citizens to be extremely efficient in managing this sector if she wants to progress rapidly and be known as a developed country. There are a number of various institutions that train their students in computer hardware and networking programs and impart a lot of hands down knowledge to their students too. One of the institutions that has become highly popular and has a cutting edge over the rest of the institutions is jetkings.

Jetkings has the best programs to offer to their students and a number of including that of red hat and CISCO. The red hat introduced red hat Linux that became an extremely popular linux based operating system. This was the first in the linux that used RPM package manager for its packaging format and gradually became a starting point for various other distributions like the yellow dog linux and the mandriva linux.

For the benefit of the enterprise environment, red hat linux paved way for the red hat enterprise linux since the year 2004. Red hat Linux had a number of advantages. For example, it had a graphical installer that was known as anaconda and this proved to be extremely convenient for novices to use. This installer has now been adopted b y a number of other distributors too due to its convenient usage. Another built in tool that was introduced by redhat linux is the lokkit which is effectively used to configure the firewall capabilities. The red hat Linux a number of shortcomings as it lacked a number of features. But this was because they had to face a number of patent and copyright problems. For instance MP3 supporter was not available since it had patents. This however could be installed later by giving royalties. It was for this reason that redhat linux advised to the usage of ogg vorbis that had no patent.

A lot of us use the dual boot systems in which multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, can be accommodated in an effort to get the best of all worlds. Using such systems can be very helpful when you have to test certain software on various platforms. In these systems, you have the option to switch to the particular system at the startup. However, sometimes due to various reasons the system is unable to start. In such situations, you should resort to performing in-place methods to fix the problem. If you are not able to address the situation, then you should use a third-party Linux recovery software to resolve the issue.

Consider a scenario wherein you have converted your system in a dual-boot system with Windows XP and RedHat Linux distribution. While in the Windows system, you accidentally clicked the 'Hibernate' option instead of the 'Shut Down' option. Now, when you start your system you are unable to do so.

Cause:

The root cause of this problematic situation is that when you chose to hibernate rather than shut down, then the MBR may have got overwritten by the GRUB. Therefore, you are unable to start the Linux system.

Resolution:

To resolve this issue, you need to restore the GRUB. To do this, you need to perform the following steps:

Boot the system with the Fedora (RedHat) distribution CD.

At the boot prompt, enter the following command and press Enter.

boot: linux rescue

You will prompted for few questions. Answer them and the Fedora installer will mount the system in the /mnt/sysimage directory.

Make the directory as your root directory by using the following command:

# chroot /mnt/sysimage

# _

From here, use the following command to install GRUB loader on the MBR:

# grub-install /dev/hda

Restart the system. It should be able to boot properly now.

However, if the problem is still not resolved then you should use reformat the hard disk and reinstall the operating system. But this method would remove all the valuable data, in all probability. So to restore the inaccessible data, you should use a third-party Linux hard drive recovery software. Such Linux recovery tools are read-only in nature that use fast yet sophisticated scanning algorithms.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a Linux hard drive recovery software that recovers lost, deleted, or formatted data from inaccessible Linux hard drives. It is able to recover data from various file systems such as ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12. In addition, this Linux recovery tool is capable of recovering data from various types of hard drives such as SCSI, SATA, EIDE, and IDE. Also, this Linux recovery software is supported by various Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Caldera, Mandrake, Sorcerer, TurboLinux, Slackware, Gentoo, etc. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.

Linux is one of the most common platforms that any web hosting companies can choose to perform their businesses, the other one being windows. Software engineers over the world swear by Linux system being better than windows. It is also cheaper than its counterpart. Therefore, linux has been a popular choice among web users over the ages. Redhat is the software company that specialises in production of linux servers.Linux was the first distribution to use RPM package manager as its packaging format and over time has also served various other distributions.Red Hat Company has been doing a lot in Linux and is the first ones to introduce new features in the server. They were the first ones to introduce graphical installer 'anaconda' in linux so that it could be used by the new users as well as other distributions. They were the first ones to introduce Lokkit also that helps to configure firewall capabilities in linux.Since then they have been developing various versions with i mproved features of Linux. They added features like glibc 2.1,egcs - 1.2, and Kudzu in their version 6. Versoin 7 updated glibc to version 2.1.92, and used a patched version of GCC and CVS. Version 8 enabled UTF-8 character that brought internationalisation in Linux. Version 9 supported native POSIX thread library which is a distinctive character of 2.4 series kernel.Linux still lacked many features like MP3 support due to copyright and patent problems. It was now time to develop a better version of Linux. Therefore, RedHat joined hands with Fedora to come out with a better version and they named it Red Hat Enterprise linux. The new version overcame all the limitations of RedHat Linux and is free to download. After the development of Enterprise linux the use and production of Linux has completely stopped in the market. Red Hat Linux or its enterprise version is one of the best linux systems available in the market today.

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