Windows uses FAT and NTFS as file systems, while Linux uses a variety of file systems.

Unlike Windows, Linux is bootable from a network drive.

In contrast to Windows, everything is either a file or a process in Linux. Please see one of my earlier post What “Everything Is a File” Means on Linux.

Linux has two kinds of major partitions called data partitions and swap partitions. Because of the existence of swap partitions, you never run out of memory in Linux (like in windows).

In terms of recovery tools, only a limited number of tools can be used on Windows, while there is a large number of UNIX based recovery tools available for Linux file systems.

From the author Nigel McFarlane:

Both Windows and Linux organize disk-based files into a hierarchy of directories. Such directories are usually called “folders” when viewed in a GUI. One whole hierarchy is called a “file system” on both platforms. The architecture of Windows and Linux file systems is similar in some points, but diverges greatly when tools are considered. Here’s a quick comparison.

On hardware derived from Intel or IBM PCs, both Windows and Linux use the Master Block Record/ Master Boot Record (MBR). That is the bit of disk used to boot the operating system and to state whether the disk is partitioned or not. On both Windows and Linux, it is common to have at most one file system per partition. That is about the end of the similarity.

Each Windows file system gets a drive letter, like “C:”. On Linux, each file system gets a device, like /dev/hda1 (“hard disk A part 1″), which is represented as a file. Such a file is a device file (since a disk is a device), hence the “dev” part of the path name. Also, the device file is not an ordinary text file, it is a “special file.” Since disks are block devices (unlike a serial mouse), such a file is fully described as a “block special device file.” The numbered part of the path can be a little weird to get right; it’s best to be guided by documentation there or extract the right name from a report.

On Windows, file systems can be FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS, to name a few. Recall FAT16 is the ancient standard responsible for Windows file names with the “8.3” file name length restriction. On Linux, filesystems can be “minix,” “ext,” or “ext2,” to name a few. Also, “minix” is an example of the ancient standard responsible for UNIX file names once being limited to 14 characters. Linux also has “msdos” and “vfat” file systems for compatibility with Windows and DOS, plus more.

Windows uses FORMAT.EXE to format a disk. Linux uses “mkfs” (“make file system”) in various specialist forms.

Each Windows file system has a File Allocation Table (FAT, VFAT, or similar) that states which disk blocks hold the topmost directory. On Linux, the equivalent on most filesystems is the superblock. A Linux file system has multiple copies of the superblock physically saved on the disk. This provides redundancy in case of a partial disk corruption. The superblock is just about always in memory on Linux; that is not the case for ancient DOS-like file systems. There are no special restrictions on files placed in the topmost directory on Linux, either.

On Windows, there is one drive letter per mounted file system: for example, C: for C: and D: for D:. On Linux there are no drive letters, so one file system is mounted on “/” and all other file systems are mounted on subdirectories of “/.” This arrangement is like the little-used MS-DOS command SUBST, or the NET USE command that supports Novell‘s NetWare. The equivalent Linux command is “mount.”

You can see all this at work on Linux, but for some of it you need to be logged in as root. Type “cat /etc/fstab” to see all the mountable devices, including floppy disks and CD players. Type “df” to see the devices currently mounted, and their free space. In the usual case you can even see the superblock: try “/sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hda1” where hda1 comes from the output of “df.” The name “dumpe2fs” is a casualty of history; it replaces the older “dumpfs.” The information produced is really just for diagnostic purposes.

Mostly file systems work for you silently. If you want to dig into Linux further, then there are plenty of tools that can be used as inspection points.

About the author
Nigel McFarlane is an open source software analyst and technologist with a broad background in technology and software engineering. He has an extensive programming background and degrees in computer science and physics. His latest book is “Rapid Application Development with Mozilla” from Prentice Hall PTR.

Source:
http://searchopensource.techtarget.c…990200,00.html

Download the Beta 2

Beta 2 images can be downloaded from a location near you.
Note: The Ubuntu Desktop images are now bigger than a standard CD, and you should use a USB or DVD for installation. Some image consolidation has occurred as well.

You can download Beta 2 ISOs from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/12.10/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Ubuntu Core)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-active/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Kubuntu Active)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Edubuntu DVD)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/12.10/beta-2/ (Xubuntu)

• Difficulty: Easy
• Application: KStars

You may already have played with KStars, but how about creating a KStars backdrop image that’s updated every time you start up?

KStars can be run with the –dump switch, which dumps out an image from your startup settings, but doesn’t load the GUI at all. You can create a script to run this and generate a desktop image, which will change every day (or you can just use this method to generate images).

Run KStars like this:

kstars --dump --width 1024 --height 768 --filename = ~/kstarsback.png

You can add this to a script in your ~/.kde/Autostart folder to be run at startup. Find the file in Konqueror, drag it to the desktop and select ‘Set as wallpaper’ to use it as a randomly generated backdrop.

Open an SVG directly

• Difficulty: Easy
• Application: Inkscape

You can run Inkscape from a shell and immediately edit a graphic directly from a URL. Just type:

inkscape http://www.somehost.com/graphic.svg

Remember to save it as something else though!

Editing without an editor

• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Application: Various

Very long files are often hard to manipulate with a text editor. If you need to do it regularly, chances are you’ll find it much faster to use some handy command-line tools instead, like in the following examples.

To print columns eg 1 and 3 from a file file1 into file2, we can use awk:

awk '{print $1, $3}' file1 > file2

To output only characters from column 8 to column 15 of file1, we can use cut:

cut -c 8-15 file1 > file2

To replace the word word1 with the word word2 in the file file1, we can use the sed command:

sed "s/word1/word2/g" file1 > file2

This is often a quicker way to get results than even opening a text editor.

Backup selected files only

• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Application: tar

Want to use tar to backup only certain files in a directory? Then you’ll want to use the -T flag as follows. First, create a file with the file you want to backup:

cat >> /etc/backup.conf
# /etc/passwd
# /etc/shadow
# /etc/yp.conf
# /etc/sysctl.conf
EOF

Then run tar with the -T flag pointing to the file just created:

tar -cjf bck-etc-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar.bz2 -T /etc/backup.conf

Now you have your backup.

Read more…….

On this page we will explain how to install Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source. We assume you have some Linux knowledge. We will start with Counter-Strike: Source.

Installing Counter-Strike: Source (SRCDS)

First, lets create a directory where we will run the hldsupdatetool, run the following command:

mkdir srcds

Now we switch to the srcdswe just created and download the hldsupdatetool.bin

cd srcds wget http://www.cstrike-planet.com/dls/hldsupdatetool.bin

If all goes well you should now have the hldsupdatetool.bin in the srcds directory. Now we change the permission of hldsupdatetool.bin so we can execute it and extract the contents from hldsupdatetool.bin

chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin ./hldsupdatetool.bin

Note: after you run ./hldsupdatetool.bin you will get a prompt to agree with the terms and conditions, simply type yes and hit enter.

If all goes well, you should now have two files in the srcds directory, the hldsupdatetool.bin which we downloaded earlier, and a steam file the hldsupdatetool generated, this is the file we will use to install Counter-Strike: Source.

Note: if you receive a ‘uncompress: command not found’ message it means your server does not have uncompress installed. You have two options to easily work around this, try the following while logged-in as root: code: ln -s /bin/gunzip /bin/uncompress Then try to run ./hldsupdatetool.bin again. If that does not work, or you do not have root privileges you can download the binary file we have available: code: wget http://www.cstrike-planet.com/dls/steam

Now that you have the steam binary file, Type the following command to begin installing CS Source

Read full story.

If you are familiar with CentOS, you know that out of the box, it is not really designed as a desktop distribution. Stella changes all that, as it is primarily aimed at desktop users, while retaining the core enterprise features and capabilities of CentOS.

And you can see that just by looking at the package manager. The package categories tell you that everything you can find in CentOS is also available in Stella. Plus desktop applications that you will not find in any default installation of CentOS. For example, an application listed in the screen shot below, is ROSA Media Player (ROMP), the default media player in ROSA Desktop, a distribution based on Mandriva Linux.

Because it is loaded with desktop applications and media codecs not available in CentOS, you can play most audio and video file formats out of the box. Here it shows a favorite online video playing in Firefox.

The next few screen shots show what the desktop looks like and some of the applications accessible from the menu. This one shows installed Internet applications.

Installed Office applications.

Installed multimedia applications.

Updates manager.

Read full story.

Oil Rush

Type: Real Time Strategy
License: Commercial
Price: 19.95 USD
Latest Version/Release Date: 1.07 / March 13, 2012

I start with the most awaited game I’ve ever seen in the Linux gaming world. Oil Rush offers stunning graphics and amazing optical realism and for that only, I can say it is the mark of a new era for the Linux gamers. If a new graphics card lives inside your system, then this game is one of the few that will take advantage of all its features. The gameplay is a bit out of the “classic” RTS style, but it is easy to learn and very enjoyable. Offering an amazing campaign, unique scenarios and competitive multiplayer action, Oil Rush is a must play for all of you Linux gamers out there.

Oil Rush Website

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Flight Gear

Type: Simulation
License: GPL
Price: Free
Latest Version/Release Date: 2.6 / February 20, 2012

Flight Gear is the most successful and sophisticated open source simulation project. Although its developers don’t consider it being a game, I choose to put it here because of the nature of this simulator. Flight Gear has been taking us to the skies since 1997, and it is now mature, stable, packed with airplanes, weather realism, beautiful scenery, flight dynamics engine designed by NASA and Boeing engineers, extremely useful for research projects and very enjoyable for us gamers. This year’s version, brought many things to be happy about, and there will be one more major release (version number 2.8) this year, so I believe this is a must for all simulation fans.

Flight Gear Website

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Heroes of Newerth

Type: RPG
License: Commercial
Price: Free
Latest Version/Release Date: 2.5.14 / March 09, 2012

Heroes of Newerth is an action RPG game, based on the popular Warcraft III mod map named Defence of the Ancients (dota). It may be the only choice for linux dota lovers, but thankfully it is the best we could have. This game offers the best “dota” experience, using beautiful graphics and optical effects, atmospheric sounds and music, stable multiplayer with a lot of choices for the player and above all it is free to play (you can buy some extras with real money). This game is evolving with constant update packs every week, and is now already very mature and linux-supportive. It will only get better through this year…must-play.

HoN Website

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Trine 2

Type: Puzzle Platform
License: Commercial
Price: 14.99 USD
Expected Release Date: April, 2012

Trine was a magnificent, mind seducing, wonderful tale. Trine 2 is going to be 4 times that. Using better graphics, more advanced physics, more satisfactory puzzles, more challenging obstacles and the multiplayer cooperation mode, this game is a must play for all Linux gamers this year. The only complain that we can have, is that Frozenbyte already released this game for other platforms…

Trine 2 Website

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Wakfu

Type: MMO RPG
License: Commercial
Price: Free
Latest Version/Release Date: 1.0 / February 29, 2012

Wakfu is a unique tactical MMORPG that continues the story of Dofus. In Wakfu, the player can choose between 14 different character classes all with different characteristics and abilities. There are four nations in Wakfu that rule their respected territories, have their own law system and clima. A player can be whatever he/she chooses to be, and their nations will be what their citizens choose them to be. This game is like a living ecosystem giving everyone the freedom of choice, but nothing comes without consequences whether these are positive or negative. Enter the magical world of Wakfu, and enjoy a game that brings character evolution and multiplayer cooperation to a new level.

Wakfu Website

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

Type: Horror Adventure
License: Commercial
Price: Unknown
Expected Release Date: Halloween 2012

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs will be the second episode of the Amnesia series. This episode is not connected directly to the first one, but it takes place on the same universe. This time we will be in the shoes of a rich industrial tycoon named Oswald Mandus, who collapses from a feverish nightmare in which he sees a mysterious dark machine… After having played the Penumbra series and the first episode of the Amnesia series called “The Dark Descent”, I am 100% sure that whatever horror related story is inside the minds of Frictional Games developers, it is going to be once again simply unforgettable.

Amnesia Website

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Xonotic

Type: FPS
License: GPL
Price: Free
Latest Version/Release Date: 0.6 / March 8, 2012

Xonotic is a first person arena shooter with fast and intense gameplay. The game is developed by former Nexuiz developers, and after quite some time of hard work from these talented people it has evolved into being better and more advanced in all sectors, making it the best FPS game on the Linux platform. Xonotic uses a heavily enhanced version of the Quake engine named DarkPlaces, that offers modern graphics and optical effects that will meet the requirements of even the hardest to please. Singleplayer and multiplayer fun, with balanced futuristic maps and more than enough different game modes to choose from. It may not be finished yet (version 0.6), but it surely is the best of its kind and a must play for all Linux users this year.

Xonotic Website

Re-blogged from.

Selinux is good security feature of Linux stop you to execute malicious applications. But it need to disable when you need to run your self developed application. You can check the selinux status by using following command:

# cat /selinux/enforce

1

If it will show 1, that means selinux enforcing is enabled.

You can disable that selinux temporarily or permanently. Use following methods to disable it.

Disable Temporarily:

To disable selinux temporarily set the 0 to /selinux/enforce file.

# echo 0 > /selinux/enforce

Read more.

One of the Windows supporter write a text string (can say a command) to execute in a Linux terminal, which can crash it in just one enter.

WARNING!!!: DON’T USE THIS IN YOUR RUNNING SYSTEM, YOU CAN CRASH IT WITH JUST ONE ENTER. IF YOU DO THAT ONLY YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONSEQUENCES.

# :(){ :|:& };:

And truly this command was doing the same, CRASHING THE LINUX IN JUST ONE ENTER.

Solution must be there, off course it is.

Read full story.

But fuser functionality is not just limited to giving information about the process. The article explains how to use fuser utility with 5 practical examples.

1. Who is Using a File or Directory?

This is the basic use of fuser command. i.e to Identify which processes are using a particular file or directory.

$ fuser  .
./:                   3965c  4175c  4281c  4334c  4337c

Read full story