Linux Questions ?

Question

Linux Questions ?

Answer 1

Well you probably only gave ubuntu in the installsion like 4gb of memory which is the minimum, to install it. so you have no memory, just un-install it in windows and then re-install it with more memory. Well firefox probably crashes due to no room for cookies and etc. As far as programs you can only use stuff that has a ubuntu version, and yes linux is pratically virus free, so you can download away even if it has a virus it won't affect your computer or windows sense its on the linux portion

Answer 2

The other guy answered one and two pretty well, so I'll elaborate on 3 and 4



3) to install things, you'll probably want to use the Synaptic Package Manager (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager)



Alternately, if you know what the package name is, it's easier to just use the terminal command:

sudo apt-get install



And you can use pretty much any program for Linux as long as you have a .deb file or the source code. Packages from the Debian repositories work more often than not, and you can compile stuff from source (though that can get really sticky, especially in Ubuntu, mainly because of some design and package decisions that the Ubuntu distro has made)



So basically what I'm saying is, you're not restricted to Ubuntu-specific packages, but you're probably better off restricting yourself to them if you don't know what you're doing.



4) There's 2 major reasons why Linux isn't riddled with viruses.



The most obvious reason and most often cited by people who don't really know what they're talking about is that noone really writes viruses for it.



That's true, but the most important reason is that Linux handles permissions differently than Windows. The default user in Windows is the administrator. When you're logged in as administrator, you're allowed to do pretty much whatever you want. The other side of that coin is that programs (including viruses) can do whatever they want.



In Linux, your user is not the administrator. Your account that you log into doesn't get to do whatever it wants. You have to explicitly give permission to a program to run as root (administrator).

Answer 3

1`- The best Linux is the one that best runs on your hardware. There are differences. Some distros are best suited for newer PCs with muscle, and some are targeted for older legacy machines. Google- 2`- All distros come w/ a base set of apps that get you productive when you log on 3`- Yep- Again.. google 4`- Yes. Linux is not hard. Its different. More secure, and you can change it as easy as changing socks!

Answer 4

1. If vista says you have 200GB free it is only looking at the windows partition. 200GB free + drive space used for vista and windows files 20GB (estimate); how large is your hard drive? Everything above the approx 220GB is on the ubuntu partition. If you want more hard drive space for ubuntu you could use gparted to resize both the windows and ubuntu partitions.



2. If you get any error messages it would help if we knew what they were. As the other poster suggested you should reinstall firefox and adobe flash by using synaptic to remove and reinstall them. If you continue to get crashes after reinstall, open a terminal and type:

dmesg

Copy and paste the last 15-20 lines of what that says. Someone could probably diagnose the problem.



3. Synaptic is your friend for installing software. There are thousands of programs that are available with it. There may be times when you want to install something that you cannot find via synaptic. I would suggest that first you google for the name of that new program +ubuntu and see if anything comes up. If you have no luck with that post a question at the ubuntu users forum to see if anyone has done it. Linux filesystems do not need to be defragged. There is a link below that explains how to benchmark the performance of your hard drive in ubuntu and make sure that DMA is optimally set.

To answer question 3: yes you can only install programs in linux that have an independent version for linux; just as you can only install programs in windows that have a version for windows. Some but not a lot of windows programs can be run in linux under WINE.

4. Linux is virus free if the user follows safe computing practices: strong password, keep system updated and patched, install software only from known/approved sources. etc. It is not true that you don't have to worry about what you download and from where. That is a symptom of arrogance and overconfidence and will lead to some kind of malware infection. It is recommended that linux run an antivirus if acting as a firewall for a windows system.



Good luck

Answer 5

1. When you install Ubuntu, unless you are using Wubi, you are installing it into a separate partition. As a general rule, I will install any linux roughly as follows, root, that is / to a 10G partition. /home to a separate partition as large as I can make it (and they still fill up fast). Usually swap at about twice the size of installed memory, and /boot which is generally about 400M for my disks.



Linux uses as much disk space as you give it, so if it is saying you don't have disk space you will have to resize the partition (which will force it to reformat it which means you will lose your files unless you back them up).



2. Flash, which you are obviously using on firefox is a memory hog. It uses both system memory and disk space. A reason for number two could very well be number one -- you didn't allocate enough disk space for the temporarry files. Remember, Linux does not access Windows directly. It can't just steal Windows disk space -- unless you tell it to.



3. The easiest way is synaptic. Look for it on your menus and try running an update, when the disk space problem is sorted out.



4. A study a few years back suggested the reason Linux is so safe is two fold, and both reasons should teach us humility. First, Linux users are not a good crowd to make money off of. They are more influential than affluent, so stealing from us is not cost-effective. Second about 3 years before the Linux kernel was written the first worms appeared. In Unix. This led to a complete rethinking and overhaul of the Unix operating system to a safer more secure model. Linux itself is actually the kernel of an Operating System. And the rest of it? Essentially the GNU Tools and X-Windows which were developed on and for Unix. Once you are comfortable with a linux box you can boot up a FreeBSD box or OpenBSD box and pretty smoothly make the transition without even being aware of most of the differences. With the GNU Tools etc we inherited Unix's safer computing model. And that is starting to be supplanted in Fedora and now Ubuntu, with selinux which was developed at the National Security Agency. So it is too tough and not profitable enough to write viruses for linux on the desktop. I still use clamav -- antivirus software for Linux, and rootkithunter. I also NEVER EVER surf the net with a browser I started with sudo. That is surfing the net as root and as the old Slackware joke goes, "If you surf the net as root you might as well be running Windoze".



Hope those answer your questions.

Answer 6

1) When you install a new OS you need to create a new partition, which is like dividing your hard disk into two pieces, one for each OS. It seems to me that you have all of your free space on the Vista partition. You need to resize the Ubuntu partition: http://www.fsckin.com/2007/10/21/partitioning-or-resizing-drives-in-ubuntu-using-gparted/



2) Go to this website and click the link to install Flash: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/Flash#Ubuntu%209.04%20(Jaunty%20Jackalope)



3) Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. It's like an app-store. You can install almost any software through this. If you want to run yor Windows applications on Linux, you can use Wine. http://www.winehq.org/

In Linux there is no need to defrag, as the filesystem simply does not fragment itself.



4) Probably the main reason is that the majority of people use Windows, so that's who they target. Another reason is that Linux is more secure, you need special privileges to do anything that will affect the computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superuser

Answer 7

Woowee, your first linux system. Fun stuff.



1) The reason why you have no disk space for everything is because of the way your hard drive is structured. Say you have a 500 GB hard drive with vista on it, you start out with

[ 500 GB - Vista ]

Then you decide to resize it so you can install linux on it as well. You might wind up with

[480 GB - Vista | 20 GB - Ubuntu ]

If you then have 280GB of files on Vista, and 10GB of files on Ubuntu, you would then have

[200GB Free - Vista | 10GB Free - Ubuntu ]

Chances are, you have something much less reasonable than this. You can use gparted to resize your partitions again.



2) That's no good! Try reinstalling firefox and flash-player. Which brings us to..



3) Finding and installing things in Ubuntu is actually absurdly less difficult than in windows. What you're looking for is your Package Manager. Typically Synaptic, or ...something that starts with an A. Package manager you're looking for, or Install/Uninstall. It's most likely under your system preferencesish menu. You can then do a search for anything you happen to want, then right click on it and install it, or just check the boxes, and hit apply. It will automagically grab anything else you need.



4) Well, that's kind of a complicated question. The simplest reason is, the most effective reason for linux to be virus free is that most viruses aren't written for linux. It has a high percentage of skilled users, a low percentage of the total number of boxes out there, and it's just not that efficient. This is typically what you'll hear windows users spouting.



The real reason, and the more complicated one, is that even if people did write viruses for linux, they would have a limited effect, and if they didn't have a limited effect, they would likely be found by other people.



See, the way linux/unix works, is you have user accounts which control your access to the system. Typically, a user is allowed to read and execute most other files on the system, but can't write to anything other than their own files. This prevents them from doing things like modifying executables, changing important configuration files, or generally doing the things that would be very useful if you were going to take over a computer.



So, while under a user account, the worst thing that a virus could do would be to steal information, destroy your personal files or fill up your hard drive/home partition. Your computer would remain largely untouched, and you could always just create a new user(although your files would miss you) There are also ways around letting most of these things affect you.



In addition, in order for a virus to affect you, it would not only have to be targeted at "Linux"(which is a very broad category really), but it would have to be targeted at a very specific vulnerability in a specific program in a specific version that YOU USE. Basically, since executable code isn't just flowing about in user-controlled ways, any virus is going to have to find a way to hitchhike on another process. Which requires there to be a security vulnerabilty on your system, and for the virus to know about it. Then it has to know what to do with your computer once it's there. The combination of factors makes it very difficult for any sort of mass market for a virus even within the linux community.



Now, in order for a virus to REALLY have any affect, it has to be executed by root. Root can pretty much do whatever it wants. It's kind of like being on a windows machine, only you can literally rewrite the machine, and the entire operating system, partition table, and every file on the computer while it's still running. Windows probably would let you do most of that too if you tried it directly, but if you did it would get really confused.



However, in order for malicious software to run as root, you..well..have to run it. When you've got things like rpm databases and debian/ubuntu's apt-get system and gentoo's portage..etc., you've got maintainers who are basically making sure that everything that gets onto your system is supposed to be there, and isn't actively trying to hurt you. They're aided in this task tremendously by the fact that almost everything you install on your system:

A) Has freely available source code, gets looked over by programmers, and any INTENTIONAL flaws in it would be very loudly and obviously pointed out.

B) Is compiled from said source code, preventing people from slipping anything else in after the fact.



In addition to that, there are also safeguards to make sure that what you're downloading is the same as what was downloaded when the safeguard was put in place, and that no one's tried adding anything on in the meantime since the last time everyone checked.





In short: Linux is virus free because you wouldn't use it to run viruses.