I've started my research on Linux at the beginning of 2008. I've tried different distributions (U/K/Xbuntu, Mandriva; Mint; Debian and Slackware). This in order to find out which of these distribution best solves my needs and also to determine (not an easy task at all, believe me) which of these distributions is best to install at School where I work.

I teach computing at primary and High School levels.

The School uses Win as the main O.S. My goal is to show and to teach Linux as an alternative to win. At the beginning as a second operating system (dual boot) and in the future...who knows :-)

It is not easy to break with "win logical" and "win marketting". By this I mean things like: Most win users that come into Lin start asking things like: Where are word and control panel? My PC? Do I have to take care of dependencies? Is there something like Photoshop in this Linux? Mounting points? Why do we need to know about Linux if everybody uses win? Why do I have to use Slackware if Ubuntu is much easier?

In order to do things correctly I think it is necessary to check if I really understood some important Linux terms and basis before going on. Since tomorrow I will start talking about Linux to my colleagues, I will appreciate -as always- your very valuable help.

These ideas (my ideas) may not follow a logical order. I will write them as they come to my mind and trying to put myself on the students and colleagues side to imagine questions they may ask. Sorry for that, my friends.

Terms:

a) What are Mount Points?: Devices and partitions are treated as files. In order to access data, one needs to mount those files (file system) (for instance sda1) into folders (/; /home; /media/cdrom; etc). Those folders are called mount points.

b) Partitioning: A system can have up to 4 primary partitions plus any number of Logical partitions or data partitions. System files should be placed into primary partitions in order to let the system boot.
Win needs to be installed in a primary partition to be able to boot up. In Linux, this is not true but I always installed root partition (/) as primary as well as SWAP. Is it the same to install / as logical?.
The rest of the partitions can be logical. Those logical partitions should go inside an Extended partition which is also considered a primary partition.

Doubt: If I have a 2 HDs system How many primary partitions can I create? 4 or 8?

c) /etc/fstab:
Below, I will show my fstab to you. Do I need to create a stanza for the cdrom or should I leave it as it was included by slackware (as a comment line)? I don't also know what devpts, proc and tmpfs are.

d) Security and Privacy of data (virus, spam, adware, etc): There are many reasons why Linux is safer than win. Some of them are:
1. The kernel is more difficult to be penetrated. Is that true?
2. Installing a program needs administrative privileges. So, things are not automatically installed.
3. Win executable files cannot be executed by Linux.
4. There are almost no risk about viruses affecting system files. Did any of you find a virus affecting your linux system?
5. Much cleaner web browsing (less porno adds and cookies)
6) Linux was really thought as a multiuser system; etc.

d) Stability: Slackware is more stable than other Linux distributions because it releases the system with already tested software versions (such as the kernel or KDE release) while some other Linux distributions are up to date and that also means "not enough tested yet". In Slackware you need to configure some things yourself (such as dependencies and configuration files). Many people take this as a disadvantage but it gives you more control on your system.

e) Why do we need to learn Linux?
Because having alternatives is better. Because everyday more and more users and companies are starting to use Linux as they operating system (look at me, for example). Because learning is always good. Because a lot of people are working on creating a good and alternative operating system and because Linux is free and open source.


Please, feel free to make all the corrections and or modifications you think are necessary.

There are many other things that come up to my mind but I don't want to bother you with terminology or glossary definitions. Sorry if this is not the place to put a thread like this.

Besides that, I hope someone else finds this information useful :-)

Thank you very much!

Glore2002.-

Yes. It's called gimp.

Actually, Win wants to be in the first primary partition on the first drive (Ex: /dev/hda1).

4 per hard drive, so a total of 8
Very much so. Also, your comment 2 is another reason it is hard for virus programs to work in Linux as easily as they do in Win O.S.'s

Not exactly. Wine can run win .exe files. (But the overall security is much better. It is more of a "sandbox", so if it's setup correctly, there SHOULD be minor possibilities of mayhem)
There are currently no known Linux virus' in the wild (Out in public)
ONLY if you setup the browser for that.

Feel free to ask questions here. we are always glad to help.

I think the most important thing to teach children is co-operation, not competition.

maybe im just a hippy. a conservative hippy.

Security-wise:

1. I'm not sure the kernel is any more difficult for someone who knows what they are doing.
2. This is definitely true, as long as you don't normally login as an administrator or super-user
3. Windows files CAN be executed by linux, but they have to be run through a program to do so. It doesn't just HAPPEN.
4. Very few viruses. Probably because there are fewer linux computers out there, and those linux users who run computers are better able to check for viruses and such. But as it is, viruses are few and far between that actually affect linux systems.
5. I don't think linux offers any advantage here. The browser that one chooses though, can have a huge effect. Firefox vs. Chrome vs. Internet Explorer vs. Safari (Macintosh)
6. This point is true, and most distributions go by it. this point connects to point number 2. Each user is limited in what they do.

/proc in the fstab is a monitor for things about the computer. If you "cat /proc/meminfo" in your terminal it will list information about your memory usage. if you "cat /proc/cpuinfo" in your terminal if will list information about your CPU(s) in your system. And it is up-to-date when giving you the information.

As long as the bootloader can reach the partition it shouldn't matter where "/" resides.


Next to what's been said already: check out Saikee's tutorial about having 200+ partitions if you feel you need more challenges :-]


Partition usage depends on machine purpose or else on taste (or laziness). Many threads on LQ about that.


1 is relatively true though the real answer would be more something along the line of "it depends" ;-p 2 I don't get. 3 is WINE and 4 is the wrong focus (though understandable): we've got enough things to worry about without viruses. 5 just isn't true unless you compare to mcrsft infestations. 6 is true.


Stability and configuring things manually isn't tied to one distribution or something one distribution can claim as an USP. That myth was busted ages ago. Of course only seasoned and impartial users will acknowledge that. Advantage slash disadvantage is just a point of view.


OSS fosters cooperation. Cooperation makes sharing ideas easier. Using OSS frees you from most licensing troubles so you can focus on making your one in a million WEB 3.0 idea reality. Unfortunately many people just use OSS and happily forget the reciprosity part though.

Very commendable indeed glore2002, keep up the very good work. I wish you every success .

Regards

Thanks my friends. You are really incredible people!

Glore2002.-

Any major distribution will do well. I'd recommend the KDE desktop since Windows users will be more familiar with it. The Gnome desktop reminds me more of CDE ... ah, ancient history! As PCs age and get replaced, you may also have an opportunity to switch to "terminal clients" which makes life much easier for the systems administrator. The "Linux Terminal Server Project" is very popular and there are a number of commercial operations that sell you terminals (and servers) and help you set up. You can even ask about the possibility of using these terminals with WinDuhs (for example, with a CITRIX server). But that's just technical stuff to keep in mind for a later date.


Word and control panel? The default desktops can be set up to have an icon to launch OpenOffice (and with a CrossoverOffice license you can even launch MSWord if you wish). KDE has a control panel right there - but why does anyone who is not an administrator want a control panel?

Devices are not mounted; filesystems are mounted. For example, the device /dev/cdrom is a special file (actually it's probably a symlink, but let's pretend it's the atual device node) which is used to interface with the CD device driver. When you 'mount' that device (mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom) what you are actually mounting is not the device but its filesystem (iso9600, UDF, etc).

Basically, the data on any STORAGE DEVICE can be made available by associating it with any directory on the system; that directory is the 'mount point'.

I say storage device because, let's say you want to use the serial port - you don't mount that, you simply open the device node (a special file) as if it were a file. So with UNIX, MOST (not necessarily all) devices are accessed as if they were files but different devices may support different sets of operations on them. Storage devices can also be accessed that way but typically the filesystems on that storage device are 'mounted' at an arbitrary directory.


This is only true of a DOS type partitioning scheme and even then not quite true. There is a limit to the number of logical partitions. A 'logical partition' is a subpartition of a 'primary' partition. Linux doesn't have to boot from a primary partition; I believe even Windows will boot from a logical partition but the bootloader must be on the 'first' hard drive. This is not a fundamental limitation, it is simply a long-standing bug in successive generations of the WinDuhs bootloaders. One day Microsoft may employ coders who know something about bootloaders.


The cdrom entry is neither here nor there; automount programs will usually mount the CDROM somewhere else anyway. Controlling access to the CDROM is not something I would attempt to explain in a post.

'devpts' is a virtual filesystem for pseudo-terminal entries. I can't say more since I don't know the technical details.

'proc' is a virtual filesystem for process information. Since it was created it had been abused to do too many other things. It is being cleaned up as people 'fix' device drivers and make information (and control parameters) available via the 'sysfs' virtual filesystem (mounted at /sys, but not shown in the fstab file you have posted). These are virtual filesystems; no such files really exist, these are simply schemes to allow the kernel and device drivers to make information easily available to users (and also make some driver parameters easily available to users).

'tmpfs' is a virtual filesystem which uses RAM for storage. It can be used to create mount points which hold transient data; access to files in a tmpfs system is extremely fast since data is only read/written from/to RAM - unless of course some of it gets swapped out.


1. not strictly true; MS is easily compromised partly because they're just plain sloppy. It is difficult to say (without looking at MS code) if the MS kernel itself is fundamentally more open to abuse.

2. In principle this is also true of MS systems from the NT branch (NT, Win2k, XP, VisDuh). Unfortunately users have the bad habit of running as admin (from the Win3.1 series) and many coders have also been lazy and thus encourage users to run as admin all the time. For example, you can't update World of Warcraft if you're playing the game as a user with no admin priviledge.

3. Not quite true; WINE (and CrossoverOffice and Cedega) provide an environment to run WinDuhs programs natively; however, those programs are forced to have the priviledges of the user running the programs. Malware can be installed only as the current user (so system-wide malware is installable only by root). This alone puts many restrictions on what the malware can do. Also, malware usually relies on the existence of other programs and services to carry out its task; most of these services and programs will not even be installed under WINE, so chances are the malware fails.

4. Viruses are generally not a problem with UNIX partly because traditionally UNIX simply does not provide the framework provided by WinDuhs. Another reason is that historically UNIX was designed in its early years to prevent users from interfering with the work of other users and from making the system unstable. All early computers typically had a multitude of users (the only way to get your money's worth since these systems cost so much). In Winduhs history it was one computer per person and people (users and developers) developed extremely bad habits.

5. Much cleaner web browsing (less porno adds and cookies)
Not true at all, although malicious sites cannot easily install spyware.

6) Linux was really thought as a multiuser system; etc.
So was Windows NT (and successors W2K, XP, VisDuh).


Absolutely untrue. The mere assertion that Slackware is more stable is ridiculous.

You're not "learning Linux" at all. You're learning to use a computer which is running an operating system other than WinDuhs. If you're just a plain user you could sit in front of a Solaris, BSD, or Linux machine and see absolutely no difference in what programs are available and how things work. In fact you can install the KDE desktop on all these systems and make them look absolutely identical. Linux really has little to do with it. On the administrative side, many things are done in a slightly different way. Some Linux distributions go out of their way to make the system look like WinDuhs - why not download a live CD from such distributions and see how different it is from WinDuhs?

There is a project (I forget the name) with a compilation of free or 'open source' (they are different beasts) software for WinDuhs. Why not try it out and use some of those alternative programs rather than the MS (or other proprietary and closed) equivalents? You will probably find that if people are familiar with the different software alternatives that you can simply switch over to a Linux operating system one day and people won't really see much of a difference. This was the approach taken by the French parliament and it has been claimed to be very effective.

i hope it is opensuse 11, with multimedia packages given in this link
http://forums.opensuse.org/applicati...le-2008-a.html

slackware is preferred for the instructor, so that he/she can tweak the distro and learn more.

that doesnt mean that we need 4 primary partition on a single disk. 4 is the max we can go

what i do mostly is first primary for windows
2nd primary is extended
and all other partitions comes under the extended, incluring windows d, / , wsap ,/home

pinniped wrote a very valuable post. I have to disagree with some of his points though.

Mandriva has a Control Center. Almost anything can be configured from there (hardware, connectivity, file sharing…). And you don't have to be an “administrator” to need this control center, because these days, personal computing means just that: the PC is usually your personal computer and you have to manage it yourself.

KDE more familiar for Windows users? Maybe. On the other hand:
— My wife complained a lot about it, tried Gnome, and decided she prefered Gnome: simpler.
— Two workmates wanted to try Linux this year; I installed them KDE; both complained. I installed Gnome; both liked it better.
In short, while KDE might look more familiar (I can't see why), people like simple things and Gnome is simpler. Too simple for me, but I'm not the average user.
Besides, Gnome does in no way look like CDE; Xfce does much more.

From experience, mounting can be explained as an alternative to “drives”, where you are sure the ”letter” always remain the same, whereas with windows, drive letters may shift depending on what you connect first (and only 26 letters are available, which can be too few in a professional/novell environment).
As for unmounting, I describe it as the Linux equivalent to Windows' “remove device safely” for usb keys.

Yves.

If you want to be able to auto mount your cdrom drive to /mnt/cdrom then you should uncomment that line. If you don't already know a # sign in front of a line indicates a comment (stuff that is ignored), so remove the # to uncomment it.

As for security, I have actually found a few trojans on my system, but as far as I could tell, they could not do anything, they were dormant.

Security-wise I would:
1) Install a firewall, in Slackware I would use:
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/efg/
2) Disable all services that you do not need
3) Close all ports that you do not need
4) Install and use rkhunter and chkrootkit
5) If you want you can also install clamav, more to protect Window$ systems on the network from getting a virus from you (even tho this virus does not affect you)

If you want to know more, I recommend looking through the RUTE, an excellent book that contains more info in one place than any other book I know:
http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html

Here are some interesting guides, both for you, and as reading material for your pupils.

Linux Documentation Project Guides

Especially: Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide

All this is from "The Linux Documentation Project" (tldp).

Note that there are translations if that is useful.

Which programs were they in H_TeXMeX_H? and where did you get the packages or sources that contained them? If there's trojaned packages out there its worth letting people know so that we know the author of those packages can't be trusted.

Uhm, actually it was from a site, I saved a site using "Save Page As...", the trojan was hidden in the _files directory. Gotta be careful of that.