Month: April 2007

Linux is known to be as a programmer’s OS i.e that the OS had been built by programmers for programmers. It is really a good system to learn programming on. The OS design is really neat and best of all its open. Everything is well documented . You know how and why a particular thing works and that’s what every programmer wants , coz programmers are inquistive by nature.

The best thing i like about is everything is file based. What this means is that almost everything on the OS is configurable by changing the right settings. If u know what exactly u are doing u can write u r own shell script for small tasks or write a full fledged program in u r favorite language to perform the function u need instead of depending on some external tools which will some other bells and whistles attached to it.

I have been a Visual basic programmer myself and i must say that i enjoy programming in Linux much greater than in Windows.

Its not necessary for u to be C or a C++ programmer to program under Linux. C or C++ is best suited for system level programming. There are lot of applications which can be written in a language such as Java. Many also prefer Python which is also a popular OO language.

So don’t worry, be Happy….Start Programming under Linux.

Nopes! that’s not the case. Live CD is an interesting concept in which the whole operating system runs from the CD without installing anything on the hard disk. Its a great way to test any new OS without the fear of messing things up. Just pop in the CD and the magic starts!. Also when u have messed up u r system real bad then the Live CD can be of great help in performing system rescue. The only negative point which i feel is at times the OS can feel a but sluggish due to the drive speed. Also valuable RAM is consumed by the OS since the whole OS runs from RAM and not from hard disk.
The most popular and one of the very first Live CD distribution was that of KNOPPIX.

Nowadays almost all the popular distribution have their Live CD versions . Ubuntu, Debian are also the popular ones.

If u need more info on Live Cd’s the following wikipedia link can be of gr8 help . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCD

One of the really good resources available in the web for Linux is the Linux Documentation Project available at http://tldp.org/. This site is really a treasure in itself and a must for every Linux user. Be it connection to internet or burning a CD its all available in tldp . The documents are constantly being updated and can also be downloaded.

If u need to find just information on Linux , Google can help u a lot. Use the following url http://www.google.com/linux for all u r Linux related queries.

Most of the times this is the 2nd question which comes to a newbie’s mind regarding Linux, the first being the major decision to use Linux. Almost all of them have an impression that all the distribution have major differences like that of between Windows and Linux.
Rest assured this is not the case. Except some major distributions which are philosophically different e.g. A Debian System and a Red Hat System , majority of them don’t have much differences.
In simple terms..they are just distributions..kind of packing all the available things with something of their own.
The main operation system would still be Linux . The Desktop would be either GNOME or KDE based but not necessary (yes u can have multiple desktops environment in a single distribution unlike Windows). The versions of the components may differ. E.g . Red hat’s Fedora Core may have Gnome 2.8 whereas Ubuntu (another recommended newbie distribution) may have 2.6 in it.

I personally find both Fedora core series ( i am currently using Fedora Core5) and Ubuntu to be good choices for newbies.Fedora has more packages than Ubuntu,but that doesn’t mean that any of the necessary packages is missing from Ubuntu.At last its a matter of personal taste..I recommended to try both or some more and decide yourselves.

I don’t want to list all the options available as the information here was created to help Linux newbies and not to scare them off. Therefore if u find u r favorite distribution or desktop environment name not listed out, u know the reason why!.