Posts Tagged ‘tutorials and tips’
Dual-booting refers to the concept of installing two operating systems on the same computer, and having the option to choose which one to boot into when the computer is rebooting. Dual-booting is actually a special case of multi-booting, or installing more than one operating on a computer.
This is a very common practice in the Linux and BSD communities. If you are coming from the Windows world and want to install a Linux or BSD distribution while maintaining your Windows installation, dual-booting is one means of accomplishing that.
Pardus is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution sponsored and developed by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey. Pardus 2009.2, the latest release, reviewed here, leaves plenty of room to customize the desktop’s features. If you are new to Linux and to Pardus, this simple tutorial will help you learn the different ways you can customize your desktop.
Note that because Pardus uses KDE as the default desktop environment, most of the tips presented in this guide may be used to customize any other KDE-based distribution. Most of the administrative tools used in this guide can be found in the control center, or more correctly, the System Settings. You can access the System Settings from Menu > System Settings.
Pardus is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution sponsored and developed by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey. It’s not a perfect Linux distribution, but it works – out of the box. A light-weight distribution, it is similar in many respects to Linux Mint. Unlike Linux Mint, however, it is not based on any other distribution, and the default desktop environment is KDE, not GNOME.
It has several custom-coded graphical management tools that new users will find very intuitive to use. Some of those tools were mentioned in Pardus 2009.1 review, which was a review of the last prior release.
Come let’s explore why I think that Geronticus eremita, the code name for Pardus 2009.2, is worth your time and disk space.
One of the best features introduced in Sabayon 5.3, the latest upgrade to the Gentoo-based, multi-purpose Linux distribution is the installer. The old installer was dumped in favor of Anaconda, the Fedora 13 installation program. Aside from bringing enterprise-class storage features to Sabayon, Anaconda boots a lot faster than Sabayon’s old installer, which had the unenviable reputation of being very slow and resource-intensive.
With the new installation program, the old installation guides are of no use to new adopters. Hence the need for this guide which presents a very detailed description of the important steps involved. You’ll find in this guide detailed explanations of the importance of disk encryption, bootloader password protection, and LVM disk space allocation.
Linux Mint 9 is a Ubuntu-based, desktop distribution that was just reviewed here. Out of the box, it is one of the most user-friendly desktop distributions available. However, like everything life, you can still customize it to suit your specific use policy. This tutorial offers a few steps you can take to customize the desktop and make using it even more fun to use than it already is.
If you are an experienced Linux user, you are probably familiar with all these tips. However, if you are not, I hope you find these tips helpful. To start this customization process, I’ll suggest that you have the Control Center, which you access from Menu > Control Center, open.
Linux Mint's Control Center
Fedora 13 is the latest update to the Redhat-sponsored, RPM-based Linux distribution. It has long held a reputation of being a testbed for features that will eventually make it into Redhat Enterprise Linux, and, therefore, less stable than other desktop-oriented distributions. And I think that’s one reason why Fedora has features that you’ll not find on other desktop-focused distributions.
It’s not a distribution that works out of the box, but if you are willing to spend an hour or so tweaking it, you can get it to the point where it just works. With this short review, I’ll present some of this distro’s best features, features that may entice potential users. I’ll also give a listing of those features that are not very well implemented, or are missing and would, therefore, create usability issues for users – especially new users.
A Paranoid, or 5-star, security rating is the highest physical security rating that you can achieve on your computer. It entails enabling a set of OS-dependent and OS-independent features.
But why would anyone want to achieve such a high physical security rating on Fedora or any other distribution? Strict control of who can access your data if your computer falls into the wrong hands, that’s why. The point is, if your computer is stolen, or seized by agents of the state, you do not want to make it easy for them to access your data. In fact, you want to make it impossible for them to access your data.
Fedora 13 is one of the Linux distributions that supports and uses Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) as the default disk partitioning scheme. While this is a good thing (it has its benefits), the space allocation to the partitions and logical volumes is not optimal. This tutorial provides a step by step guide on how to configure LVM (on Fedora 13) in a manner that satisfies the basic guidelines of LVM configuration.
So if you have the installation disk ready, insert into your computer’s optical drive and let’s get started. Note that this tutorial involves a computer with only one hard disk.
You may or may not get to see this window, but if you do, just select the disk you would like to use for the installation, then click “Next.”
Select disk to use for installation
Disk encryption is one very important tool that you can use to enhance the physical security posture of our computer, and Fedora is the only distribution that makes it very easy for every computer user to enjoy its security benefits.
Fedora 13′s implementation of disk encryption is still the same as on prior releases. The only difference is that the position of the check box to enable it changed from close to the top of the window, to very near the bottom. By default, the box is unchecked. All that’s needed to encrypt your disk then is to make sure that the check box next to “Encrypt system” is enabled before you click the “Next” button.
Disk partitioning options
Fedora is one of a handful of Linux distributions that adopts the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) as its default disk partitioning scheme. LVM provides more flexible disk management capabilities than the age-old UNIX/Linux method, and that’s why I prefer Linux distributions with support for it over those that do not.
The problem with Fedora’s default LVM configuration is that the allocation of disk space to the logical volumes violates a very simple guideline that you are encouraged to abide by: Allocate just enough disk space to each logical volume that’s required to get your system up and running. In other words, leave some disk space unallocated in case you need it to grow a logical volume or to create a new logical volume for a special purpose.
The installation program on Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint 9 are the same. And that’s because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. So if you install one, which involves a simple seven-step process, you can use the same instructions to install the other.
But being simple does not mean that the default partitioning scheme, which creates only two partitions, will satisfy the requirements of the system you wish to create. That’s when a fundamental knowledge of disk partitioning on a Linux system comes in handy, and that’s why, for those without that knowledge, this guide has been written.
In some situations, you may want to install more than one operating system on a computer. One method of accomplishing that is to utilize virtualization applications to run one atop the other. Another method, one that does not require specialized hardware or software, is to create a multi-boot scheme – installing multiple operating systems on one or more hard drives (on the same computer.) Dual-booting is a multi-boot example involving two operating systems.
This tutorial gives you the instructions needed to dual boot Linux Mint 9 and Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop. Unless you intend to create custom partitions, very little effort is required on your part. The installer does virtually everything.
When installing Ubuntu, you are required to create one user account. That account is the “root” account, used to perform all administrative functions on the system. Any user with access to that account can modify or change any setting they want. Sometimes it necessary to create another account, say, for a guest, or for some one you want to use the computer briefly, but do not want to give them the power to make any changes to the default settings. To make it easier for you to manage such situations, you can create a guest account on the system, and make it available to your guest user.
To begin creating this account, launch the Users and Groups management tool from System > Administration > Users and Groups. Then click on the “Add” button.
It’s been almost a month since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m not a fan of Ubuntu, but Lucid Lynx, the code name for the latest version of Ubuntu, is, in so many ways, a better operating system to use than prior releases. However, it still falls short in some areas. This aim of this article is to offer customization tips to those new to the operating system. Tips that will enhance the default configuration and, therefore, make it a whole lot more fun to use than the default configuration allows.
Customization tips that will be covered in this article are:
