Sunday, May 26, 2013

Don't Fear the Penguin!

So, you're interested in Linux.  Awesome!  There's a version of netflix for ubuntu now, and flash is working pretty darn well (in as much as flash works at all).  There's support for most of the top-end graphics cards, and games work well under Linux now. 

That pretty much eliminates the final few hurdles that a windows person could tout as something "holding them back" from moving to linux.

I expect we'll see a lot more people embracing linux over the next few years.


Let's explore the linux landscape.


If you're coming from Windows, you're moving from a (pretty-much) "single-user system" to a full multi-user system.

Windows doesn't have the idea of multiple people being logged into the windowing environment at the same time, each getting desktops and being able to run programs.  At the same time.

Linux can do that - you can set it up so it'll run Xwindow programs which display remotely on other computers. (more on that below)  And, multiple different (or the same) accounts can be logged in via different devices - terminals, virtual terminals, via ssh "network connections", etc.

Linux has the idea of "regular" users and a "superuser" - root.  So you'll want to have a regular user that you use, and then escalate to root privilege only when something you're trying to do won't work without that extra privilege.  That helps ensure (mostly) that whatever you do as a regular user won't break the computer.

You'll also want to have a secondary backup userID you can login as, for testing.

It's really handy, if you're having problems with a particular program, to be able to login as another user to see if that same problem exists for a "clean" user that hasn't been doing all of the other stuff your main user has been doing.

Next - let's talk about devices - drives, CDs, USB sticks, etc.


Linux doesn't expose devices like Windows does.  You don't say C:/where/ever/

Instead, linux just has a "file system" directory tree, which starts up at / and works its way down, with directories inside directories.

The devices get mounted at "mount points" - effectively replacing the existing directory in the parent filesystem with the "/" directory of the mounted device.

An explanation is in order.

Say my main drive has:

/
|-- bin
|-- boot
|-- etc
|-- home
|-- lib
|-- lost+found
|-- media
|-- mnt
    `-- drive
|-- opt
|-- proc
|-- root
|-- sbin
|-- selinux
|-- srv
|-- sys
|-- tmp
|-- usr
`-- var

(yes the above is majorly simplified)

I might have a "data" drive with:

/
|-- photos
|-- music
|-- videos

I could setup a line in /etc/fstab to mount that data drive, or do it interactively:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/drive

After I did that the drives contents would show up inside the "mount point":

/
|-- bin
[...]
|-- media
|-- mnt
    `-- drive
         `-- photos
         `-- music
         `-- videos
|-- opt
[...]
`-- var

Whether it's a secondary drive, or a CD, or a USB stick, or even a remote system's drive ( a network mount) - to get to the files on that device, you'll go through a mount point.

It's really a lot simpler in terms of how it exposes the files to end-users - it's simply always going to be /some/path/to/the/files/you/need/file1.txt

Here's a lot more detail on the Linux Filesystem: Linux Filesystem Hierarchy

Next - Run levels   (click the link to the left to learn about them)


Just because your system's booted doesn't mean it'll be graphical.  Review the runlevels and learn what they mean.  There aren't many, and it's immensely useful to know how to get around problems if/when they happen, by switching to a different runlevel.

You don't need to memorize LFH or run level info - but it's totally worthwhile to understand what they are and remember they're there for when you need them.

There's more of course, but with the above, you have the basics for this new system that's in front of you.  YES - it has a lot of switches and dials and knobs and buttons.

But - of course, you'll want to jump into using all the cool open source software that Linux has to offer, right?

Most of the stable open source stuff for Linux is available via "packages".


With a package manager such as 'yum' or 'synaptic' installing new packages on Linux is a breeze.  It wasn't always easy... but it's now practically painless.

Your package manager may have a means of browsing the packages by category, and may show you descriptions, etc. - for example, the "Ubuntu Software Center" provides an outstanding interface to let you explore what it has to offer.  

For starters, you'll want to stick with programs you can get "in channel" - via the package manager on your version of Linux.  After you've mastered Linux, you can pull in open source software from almost anywhere, with enough patience, research, and willingness to experiment.

Check out the categories of programs that are available via your package manager.  The Ubuntu Software Center has:

Accessories
Education
Fonts
Games 
Graphics
Internet
Office
Science & Engineering
Sound & Video
Themes & Tweaks
Universal Access
Developer Tools
System

It also has a dozen odd "featured applications" - with a lot of cool stuff you might not have even thought about.

Let's look at browsers.


Chrome's still Chrome!  In fact, if you have chrome hooked into a google account, it'll move your bookmarks and preferences and even your theme across from Windows to Linux.   Your mileage may vary, but this worked seamlessly for me, and I wasn't even trying to make it work.  It just did.

I can highly recommend that as a mechanism for transitioning onto linux.

Firefox... can get slow with lots of add-ins.  So, keep it lean.  I keep firebug turned off unless I absolutely need it.  Most of the time I can figure out problems with chrome's F12 debugger, then once those are fixed everything just works right in Firefox.

You may be able to use a remote-bookmark-sync add-in to move your windows firefox bookmarks to linux - I've not tried that though.

There are other open source browsers.  They're great.  Use them to test your stuff.  But, unless you're being really experimental... stick with Chrome as your primary browser.  Or, firefox if you must.

Your browser runs in a window.  Please forgive this horrible segue into...

The next subject - windowing.


Linux runs Xwindow.   That's a big, complicated windowing system.  

It's capable of being "client/server" - you can really EASILY display windows on one computer with the program that's behind those windows running on another computer.  And with the networking setup correctly, you can even do that across any virtual machines you might run under Linux as well.

With that immense flexibility comes complication.

There are at least three differing ways you can be "logged in" on linux.



  • A system-level login is done by "getty" which handles terminal logins and virtual screen logins - the ones you get when you hit ctrl-alt-F1 through ctrl-alt-F8 or so.
  • Remote logins are handled via the "ssh" service - by default listening on port 22
  • The Xwindow system will present you with some graphical way of "logging in" if it's running.



When you see a graphical login screen please don't think that's linux.  It's not - it's GDM.  Do a google image search for "gnome display manager" and you'll see what I mean - this program has been adapted 10 ways from Sunday for various distros, but it's basically about getting someone "logged in" on Xwindow.

Being "logged in" under Xwindow pretty much means... you have a Window Manager running.  At a more detailed level, you have an "X window session" and one of the X clients is your window manager.  But, most of the time, that means the same thing as "you have a window manager running".   

There are a handful of good window managers.  Gnome, KDE, xfce, and others.  Google "gnome vs kde vs xfce" and read up on them.

For starters... just use whatever window manager your Linux already has.

The Linux command line


Get used to the idea of logging in on a virtual terminal.  You can hotkey out of the windowing environment, do some work on a commandline, then hotkey back into X.  ctrl-alt-F1, use the shell, ctrl-alt-F7 (probably) and you're back in X.

Also get used to using ssh.  You can ssh into your linux computer from elsewhere.  You can ssh into any virtual machines you might run (under VirtualBox or VMware or whatever).  

AND... you can (a) tell X to allow remote windowing clients to connect from machineA, (b) ssh to machineA, (c) set your DISPLAY environment to point back at your current machine, (d) run X-window programs on that remote machine, which will display on your local machine.  This is HUGELY useful.

There are a bunch of Xwindow programs that will emulate terminals for you.

List of terminal emulators

There's "terminal" from the window manager's menu system - that's typically actually gnome-terminal.  There's a KDE terminal program,  There's Xterm, and there are others as well - yakuake being my absolute favorite.

You'll definitely want to get accustomed to using the commandline for file manipulation, for interacting with version control systems like git, etc. - and possibly for file editing as well.

I totally prefer editing a text file in vim over using a "notepad" or "word"-ish word processor GUI.

Here's an excellent, highly-recommended read regarding "TTYs" and their role in UNIX/Linux - understand this and you're well on your way to understanding linux:  The TTY demystified

Owning the command line instead of letting it own you


By now, your coffee's cold, and you're overwhelmed... but don't be!  Linux tries to be pretty open and friendly, believe it or not.

At a commandline, type in "man man" to see the manual page on how the manual pages work.  And, "man apropos" to learn about a REALLY awesome program for searching through the manual pages.

Apropos is way cool and extremely useful.  It's google for manpages.  It might take a few tries, but you can find what you're looking for.  

Example:  ...what was the name of that flight simulator I installed recently?

$ apropos flight
...hrm... no output...
$ apropos simulator
sabresdl (6)         - SVGAlib fighter plane simulator
XRunSabre (6)        - SVGAlib fighter plane simulator
xsabre (6)           - SVGAlib fighter plane simulator

Yup!  Sabre.  Looks like I need to run XRunSabre to start it.  (Guess what I'll be doing for the next couple of hours?)

There's a hidden little corner in Linux named /usr/share/docs - check it out - there's a tremendous collection of random information in there.

Using Linux from day to day


It's your computer, and you want it to be easy to escalate to root privilege, but don't want to always be root - that's quite unsafe.  However, you don't want to have to type in a password anytime you want to escalate to root.  

How to do this?  Leverage 'sudo'.

First, escalate to root:

su -
(enter root password)

Then, add one line at the end of the file /etc/sudoers to tell sudo your account is allowed to escalate to root.  All of the following assumes your username is 'joe' - replace that with your real username.

If you know the basics of the 'vi' editor, run 'visudo' and add an extra line at the bottom of the file:

joe ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

Or if you want to use the editor "nano" for example, 

# which nano
# export EDITOR=/replace/with/path/to/nano
# visudo

...which will let you edit the file in the nano editor (friendlier for beginners)

Lastly, if you're brave you can simply do surgery on the file from the commandline.  You'll want to ensure you get the syntax EXACTLY right, or you may find you've broken sudo.

To add a line to the end of the file you can run:

echo "joe ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

BE SURE TO PUT IN TWO > SYMBOLS!   With >> you're adding one line to the END of that file.  With only one > you would be replacing the entire file with only that one line - a really bad idea.

For more info on sudo and sudoers use 'man':   

man sudoers
man sudo

So, after you've edited the /etc/sudoers file, exit the root shell.  You're back to being logged in as 'joe' - but now you can run stuff as root super easy by just typing 'sudo ' followed by whatever commandline you want to run.

Here's an example.  At a certain point, you're bound to be interested in "what's running" on the system.  Not just as 'joe' - as any user.

You can use the 'pstree' program to see all of the programs.  'man pstree' for details, but for some unfathomable reason I like to use the following options:

sudo pstree -paul

Another example.  You want to see what 'services' are running.  Services listen on TCP/IP ports and let remote clients connect to those ports.  'man netstat' for details, but this is what you'll want to run:

sudo netstat -ntlp

What IS all of this stuff that's running?


Feel free to ask me or others about various processes and services - google them and learn.  A lot of these things can be turned off if they're not needed.

Final notes


Lastly let's discuss synergy and dropbox.  Both of these tools can help you with transitioning to a multi-OS solution.

Synergy lets you share your keyboard/mouse across multiple computers - linux/windows/mac - and also copy/paste across them.

Here's the link to synergy:  Synergy  (and please do support them if you can)

Dropbox is... well... dropbox.  Dropbox - Simplify your life 

It's a network drive to drop files on.  It works well on linux and windows and mac as well, so you can use it to move files back and forth, or just leave them out on dropbox and then you can get to them from anywhere.

If you get stuck on something with Linux, and Google doesn't help, don't hesitate to contact me - I'll be happy to help as best I can.

No comments:

Post a Comment