Linux Documentation Projects

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Ten Linux apps you must install

Ten Linux apps you must install:

Product Round-up Unless you are operating in the enterprise class, most Linux software is free, which is both a blessing and a hindrance. Sure, there are some truly fantastic apps out there, but all to often you have to wade through a mess of buggy unfinished projects with dependencies on other defunct code to get to what you want. To help with such endeavours, here are ten Linux applications I find certainly come in handy when configuring a new installation. For the record, Ubuntu 12.04 was used here and these apps are available from the Ubuntu Software Centre, with the exception of PeaZip.

ClamTk

As a Linux user, you're unlikely to suffer from any infected files, but that's not to say you're immune. More to the point, you do need to look out for colleagues running Windows. Ever since you unwittingly told them that Libre Office will open Word documents, you could easily end up receiving infected files that won't make a difference to your platform but could cause havoc on theirs when passed on.
ClamTk is a nice graphical front end for the ever robust ClamAV. It's very light weight and has a regularly updated comprehensive definitions list of any potential threats to yourself or others.

More info ClamTK on Sourceforge

GParted

GParted is an excellent front-end to GNU Parted that I normally find myself using on live disc distributions to remedy issues caused by botched multi-boot set-ups, but it's an incredibly handy tool to keep around anyway.
GParted provides a simple, easy to use interface to a versatile, no-nonsense partition editor that gets what you want done with very little fuss. There’s more to it that butchering partition maps though, GParted can also be used to clone partitions and image entire disks and unless you have an unhealthy desire to work with exFAT or UFS disks, then you won't have a problem.

 

Kate

Kate is a professional programming text editor that no coder should be without. Syntax highlighting extends to over two hundred types of code file, and file encoding is automatically detected. The powerful search and replace feature can also perform actions across multiple files, including those accessed over web protocols.
Kate also includes an emulation mode that mimics the modal behaviour of the command-line vi editor and its key shortcuts. It is also possible to expand Kate's functionality with additional plugins that include the likes of file browsers and spell checking.

More info Kate

Libre Office

Libre Office is the established standard for office productivity in the open source world. With it you get just about everything you could ask for in terms of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, without all the unnecessary bloat of Microsoft Office.
For those who can't escape the world of Microsoft entirely, Libre Office has a high level of compatibility with all Word/Excel/Powerpoint formats that you'll be expected to work with to get your job done. Chances are, if you installed a standardised Linux distribution in the past few years, Libre Office was already included.

LuckyBackup

LuckyBackup isn't a backup utility in the traditional sense, but a front end for your old command-line friend rsync. As far as reliability goes, there is no substitute for rsync. That said, having a straightforward graphical interface on top is a very nice touch.
LuckyBackup is also far from complicated to use, all the options are clear so you can achieve anything from one-sided copy to incremental two-way synchronisation. Of course, the more advanced options of rsync are accessible too, but they'll stay out of the way until you need to find them. There's also a scheduler built-in and it will even email you when the job is done.

More info LuckyBackup on Sourceforge

PeaZip

Although most Linux distributions come with an archive manager, such as File Roller in Ubuntu, PeaZip is much faster and works with more formats. With support for over 150 archive types when extracting and the ability to create 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, PAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, WIM, XZ, and ZIP files, the feature list is fairly comprehensive.
PeaZip even supports RAR extraction, an archiving option popular in the Windows world that's not so prevalent under Linux. In addition to managing other formats, PeaZip can also create secure PEA archives which ensure both privacy and authentication of the contents.

Shutter

No matter what your purpose is, when it comes to taking screenshots, Shutter is the only option. It is incredibly feature-rich and very fast – unless you enable the timer mode, of course. You can capture certain areas, individual windows, the entire desktop or even menus and tooltips.
Shutter isn't limited to just capture either, once the shot is taken, it can be transferred directly into the editor where you can add shapes or text, censor private information or crop some more if you got it wrong the first time. From there, you can even upload directly to a number of image hosts without leaving Shutter.

More info Shutter

SMPlayer

On Mac OS or Windows, I will always use VLC Player for media playback. Under Linux, however, I have the option of using SMPlayer. Given that its back-end MPlayer is standard on just about all distributions, SMPlayer is highly compatible wherever you want to run it. Not only that, but it supports just about every possible format imaginable.
The real key to SMPlayer's success though, is its ability to remember settings on a per-file basis. It will remember where you stopped playing, and resume with the same audio track, volume or subtitle settings as before. Perfect.

Synapse

Everybody likes launchers, right? Well if you find it just a bit too cumbersome to look through a menu or folder, give Synapse a go. It is incredibly responsive and finds what you are looking for very quickly due to its heavy integration with the Zeitgeist framework.
For the more paranoid user, this could be something of a nightmare as Zeitgeist logs your file and application usage habits. Personally, when it comes to productivity, I find it's worth the trade-off simply due to the amount of time it saves.

More info Synapse

Synaptic Package Manager

Synaptic Package Manager used to be a standard feature of Ubuntu until it was supplanted by the Ubuntu Software Centre and while it is now easier to find and manage software, the selection on offer is more limited. Indeed, there's still no replacement for Synaptic if you want to run software from third party sources or manage those that you have installed manually.
Whether you want to do something obscure – like downgrade a package or simply view the changelog – there is no reason that the first application that you download from the Ubuntu Software Centre should be anything other than Synaptic Package Manager. ®

WHY LINUX IS SECURE

WHY LINUX IS SECURE ?  ! ??  !!! ???? !!!!!..............

One Of The Reason That linux is secure..

Nope itz a main reason that linux is secure...!

IT Z BECUS OF ITZ FIREWALL CALLED..

              "SELINUX"

That is  Security-Enhanced Linux

Let See about the SELINUX......

Click to see...

Also me too click me...

 

Large File Support in Linux

To support files larger than 2 GiB on 32-bit systems, e.g. x86, PowerPC and MIPS, a number of changes to kernel and C library had to be done. This is called Large File Support (LFS). The support for LFS should be complete now in Linux and this article should give a short overview of the current status.
64 bit systems like Alpha, IA64 and x86-64 don't have problems with large files but do support the new interfaces also. In this case the new interface is mainly an alias to the normal interface.
The LFS support is done by the Linux kernel and the GNU C library (aka glibc).

Limits

LFS raises the limit of maximal file size. For 32-bit systems the limit is 2³¹ (2 GiB) but using the LFS interface on filesystems that support LFS applications can handle files as large as 2⁶³ bytes.
For 64-bit systems the file size limit is 2⁶³ bytes unless a filesystem (like NFSv2) only supports less.

LFS in Glibc 2.1.3 and Glibc 2.2

The LFS interface in glibc 2.1.3 is complete - but the implementation not. The implementation in 2.1.3 contains also some bugs, e.g. ftello64 is broken. If you want to use the LFS interface, you need to use a glibc that has been compiled against headers from a kernel with LFS support in it.
Since glibc 2.1.3 was released before LFS support went into Linux 2.3.X/2.4.0-testX, some fixes had to be made to glibc to support the kernel routines. The current stable release of glibc is glibc 2.2.3 (2.2 was released in November 2000) and it does support all the features from Linux 2.4.0. Glibc 2.2.x is now used by most of the major distributions in their latest release (e.g. SuSE 7.2, Red Hat 7.1). glibc 2.2 supports the following features that glibc 2.1.3 doesn't support:

• getdents64 system call
• 64 bit file locking interface (see below for details)

Programs compiled against glibc 2.1.3 will work on a LFS system, there's no need to recompile the programs (with the exception of the 64 bit fcntl locking). Only glibc needs to be updated to support LFS.
Note that glibc 2.0 and libc5 do not support LFS at all.

Locking on Large Files is Not Supported withfcntl/lockfin Glibc 2.1.x

Locking via fcntl/lockf doesn't work with large files in glibc 2.1.3. The support has been added in Linux 2.4.0-test7 to the kernel and needed incompatible changes to glibc, only glibc 2.2 does handle them. This means:

• You can't use the flags F_GETLK64, F_SETLK64 and F_SETLKW64 with fcntl when you use glibc 2.1.x. If your programs use them now, they fail. They also need to be recompiled with glibc 2.2 which will support these fcntl flags.
• lockf64 only works on files < 2 GiB with glibc 2.1.x, it does work with glibc 2.2 and no recompilation is needed.

LFS in the Linux Kernel

Since Linux 2.4.0-test7 most of the kernel interface is included into the kernel. The open problems and restrictions are described below.

File Systems

We can separate two levels of LFS compliance in the file systems:

1. Full support for files > 2 GiB and O_LARGEFILE
2. Limited LFS support: it gives proper EINVAL/EFBIG/EOVERFLOW error messages when you try to use O_LARGEFILE or positions > 2 GiB.

At least the second level should be generally reachable, but is some work to audit all the weird file systems.
Some bugs in NFSv2 regarding (2) have been fixed already, but some are missing (like the O_LARGEFILE check). Other file systems probably miss it too. A complete audit of all file systems is needed (see also the 2.4 kernel TODO page at http://linux24.sourceforge.net/).
The situation about the different filesystems used in Linux 2.4.0 and later can be summarized as follows:

ext2/ext3

Full support for LFS

NFSv2

Cannot handle LFS due to protocol restrictions (limited to 2 GiB - 1); limited LFS support but expect some bugs

NFSv3

The protocol is ok, but I'm not sure about the Linux implementation status

ReiserFS 3.5.x (not part of the kernel, separate patch)

Does not support LFS

ReiserFS 3.6.x (part of kernel 2.4.1 and newer)

Full support for LFS if the new on disk format is used. This format is incompatible to the format used by 3.5.x (see below for some more details).

coda

Does not work with LFS (local cache issues, protocol is ok)

UFS

Full support for LFS (although not complete vs. O_LARGEFILE flag use)

minix

limited to 2 GiB - 1 (file size is limited to 65804 MiB but note that filesystem size is limited to 64 MiB - but holes are allowed)

SysV (aka SCO)

limited to 2 GiB -1

msdos

limited to 2 GiB - 1

umsdos

based on msdos, limited to 2 GiB - 1

smbfs

Older protocols are limited to 4 GiB - 1. SMB extensions allow 64 bit filesystems. Linux smbfs implementation is currently limited to 2 GiB - 1.

NCPfs

protocol is limited to 4 GiB - 1, Linux implementation to 2 GiB - 1

JFS

Should work with LFS (for details about JFS see http://oss.software.ibm.com/developer/opensource/jfs)

XFS

Should work with LFS (for details about XFS see http://http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/)

other file systems

I don't have any information yet, feel free to send me updates.

Note for ext2

When files > 2 GiB are created in ext2 older kernels will mount file systems only read-only (it sets a read-only compatibility flag).

Note for ReiserFS

Chris Mason wrote:

Disks formatted with the current 2.2 code are called our 3.5 disk format. They will not support large files under any kernel (even the 2.4 code).
But, you can mount a 3.5 disk format under the 2.4 kernel code, and use -o conv. This will turn on large file support for the old disks, but only new files will be allowed to grow past 2 GiB.
Once you mount with -o conv, you can't mount under 2.2 any more. We are testing a back port of the LFS disk format to 2.2, it should be ready soon. It has the same -o conv mount option that our 2.4 code has, so all the same rules will apply.

rlimit64 Is Not Supported

The Linux kernel doesn't support a 64bit rlimit system call yet, glibc supports getrlimit64 and setrlimit64 but wraps too large values to RLIMIT_INFINITY.

Using LFS

For using LFS in user programs, the programs have to use the LFS API. This involves recompilation and changes of programs. The API is documented in the glibc manual (the libc info pages) which can be read with e.g. "info libc".
In a nutshell for using LFS you can choose either of the following:

• Compile your programs with "gcc -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64". This forces all file access calls to use the 64 bit variants. Several types change also, e.g. off_t becomes off64_t. It's therefore important to always use the correct types and to not use e.g. int instead of off_t. For portability with other platforms you should use getconf LFS_CFLAGS which will return -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 on Linux platforms but might return something else on e.g. Solaris. For linking, you should use the link flags that are reported via getconf LFS_LDFLAGS. On Linux systems, you do not need special link flags.
• Define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE and _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE. With these defines you can use the LFS functions like open64 directly.
• Use the O_LARGEFILE flag with open to operate on large files.

A complete documentation of the feature test macros like _FILE_OFFSET_BITS and _LARGEFILE_SOURCE is in the glibc manual (run e.g. "info libc 'Feature Test Macros'").
The LFS API is also documented in the LFS standard which is available at http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large.file/x_open.20Mar96.html.

LFS and Libraries other than Glibc

Be careful when using _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 to compile a program that calls a library or a library if any of the interfaces uses off_t. With _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 glibc will change the type of off_t to off64_t. You can either change the interface to always use off64_t, use a different function if _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 is used (like glibc does). Otherwise take care that both library and program have the same _FILE_OFFSET_BITS setting. Note that glibc is aware of the _FILE_OFFSET_BITS setting, there's no problem with it but there might be problems with other libraries.

Distributions with LFS Support

SuSE 7.0

Release 7.0 of SuSE Linux supports LFS on all supported platforms. The kernel of SuSE 7.0 is based on Linux 2.2.16.
The LFS support in the SuSE Linux kernel is the same as in the development kernel 2.4.0-test1 for the file systems which are in both kernels, glibc supports all the features of the kernel. The different filesystems are ReiserFS (so far only in SuSE, the 2.2 port doesn't support LFS) and NFSv3 (not available in SuSE 7.0). This means that you need to use ext2 as file system for LFS.
Both Linux 2.4.0-test1 and SuSE 7.0 do not support the getdents64 system call and the 64 bit locking interface. These are only implemented in Linux 2.4.0-test8 and newer.

SuSE 7.1

Release 7.1 of SuSE Linux supports LFS on all supported platforms. SuSE 7.1 comes with kernels based on 2.4.0 and 2.2.18.
The 2.2.18 kernel support LFS with the ext2 file system. The 2.4.0 kernel supports LFS with the ext2 and NFSv3 filesystems and additionally with the ReiserFS filesystem if the new ReiserFS format (incompatible to the 2.2 format) is used instead of the default 2.2 format.
SuSE 7.1 comes with glibc 2.2 that supports the full LFS interface. But the 2.2.18 kernel only does not support the 64-bit filelocking and the getdents64 calls.

SuSE 7.2 and newer

The kernel support for LFS is like the one in 7.1.

Other Distributions

Since I can't verify each and every distribution, I have to trust others for the following information.

Debian

The current stable release (Debian 3.0, codename "woody") has LFS support.

Red Hat

The beta called Fisher was the first to have LFS support (thanks to Russ Marshall). Current Red Hat releases like Red Hat 8 have LFS support.
Tim Small <tim@digitalbrain.com> send the following special combo-gotcha for Red Hat 6.2 (and probably other older distros as well):
The 'ulimit' command which is built into bash 1.x (the default for Red Hat 6.2) uses the 32 bit versions of the system calls. The way that glibc currently behaves means that requests to the 32bit setrlimit, or getrlimit will translate 'unlimited' to '2³¹ - 1' in both directions (I would argue that setting a limit to RLIM_INFINITY using the 32bit interface should end up in a call to the 64 bit setrlimit variant with the 64 bit RLIM_INFITIY).
The default PAM configuration for sshd (/etc/pam.d/sshd), includes the line:

session    required     /lib/security/pam_limits.so

Which fiddles about with various limits (using the 32bit versions of the calls).
If you log-in using ssh, and use bash 1.x to view the limits, you will be told that your file size is unlimited, when it is in fact set to 2097151 (1024 byte) blocks!
Workaround:

• Either:
  • Comment out the line in /etc/pam.d/sshd (note that limits set in /etc/security/limits.conf will no longer be effective for ssh logins)
  • Or: Rebuild the pam package with 64 bit support
• Install the bash2 RPM
• Either:
  • rename the old bash, and symlink /bin/bash2 to /bin/bash (you may want to keep /bin/sh pointing at the old bash, if you are worried about compatibility)
  • Or: use vipw to change users over to /bin/bash2

Other...

I don't have any other information yet. Feel free to send me detailed information about distributions if they supports LFS.

Some Other Often Requested Data about Filesystems

Please send me information to fill in the missing bits.

Maximum On-Disk Sizes of the Filesystems

Filesystem	File Size Limit	Filesystem Size Limit
ext2/ext3 with 1 KiB blocksize	16448 MiB (~ 16 GiB)	2048 GiB (= 2 TiB)
ext2/3 with 2 KiB blocksize	256 GiB	8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 4 KiB blocksize	2048 GiB (= 2 TiB)	8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 8 KiB blocksize (Systems with 8 KiB pages like Alpha only)	65568 GiB (~ 64 TiB)	32768 GiB (= 32 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.5	2 GiB	16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.6 (as in Linux 2.4)	1 EiB	16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
XFS	8 EiB	8 EiB
JFS with 512 Bytes blocksize	8 EiB	512 TiB
JFS with 4KiB blocksize	8 EiB	4 PiB
NFSv2 (client side)	2 GiB	8 EiB
NFSv3 (client side)	8 EiB	8 EiB

Note Kernel Limitations: The table above describes limitations of the on-disk format. The following kernel limits exist:

• On 32-bit systems with Kernel 2.4.x: The size of a file and a block device is limited to 2 TiB. By using LVM several block devices can be combined enabling the handling of larger file systems.
• 64-bit systems: The sizes of a filesytem and of a file are limited by 2⁶³ (8 EiB). But there might be hardware driver limits that do not allow to access such large devices.
• Kernel 2.6: For both 32-bit systems with option CONFIG_LBD set and for 64-bit systems: The size of a file system is limited to 2⁷³ (far too much for today). On 32-bit systems (without CONFIG_LBD set) the size of a file is limited to 2 TiB. Note that not all filesystems and hardware drivers might handle such large filesystems.

Note in the above: 1024 Bytes = 1 KiB; 1024 KiB = 1 MiB; 1024 MiB = 1 GiB; 1024 GiB = 1 TiB; 1024 TiB = 1 PiB; 1024 PiB = 1 EiB (check http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html)

Maximum Number of Partitions

An IDE disk has 64 minors, one is used for the full disk and therefore 63 partitions are possible. A SCSI disk has 16 minors and therefore only 15 partitions maximal.

Recently supported applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

 

Recently supported applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat® has a broad ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) who have tested and certified their applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Thanks to these partners, our customers can benefit from the new technologies and cost savings in Red Hat Enterprise Linux immediately.

Linux Command

Linux Command to find the system configuration and hardware information

Q. What is the command to find the system configuration on Linux operating system using command line (text) mode?

A. Most of the hardware information can be extracted from /proc file system, for example display CPU and Memory information, enter:
cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo

Distro news and release’s

• Linux Royal

So got the Royal Lite build done. Removed all things Unity/Gnome-shell/and classic. So it has only Cinnamon and Cinnamon 2D for DE options at bootup. Also removed a bunch of apps/icons/themes. Added Royal Icons/Cinnamon Themes. Also installed VLC/Restricted Extras/and of course Remastersys so I could build it. Wanted to make it a bit smaller but not at the cost of Libre Office so I left it. It has a minimal amount of apps though, I got it down to 971mb, so about 200mb bigger then Ubuntu and about 40% the size of full Royal builds. Even in live it only booted using 199mb of ram as noted in the screenshot here. Will try and get it uploaded tomorrow. The only thing I have left to test is installing it.

• Crunchbang

well as we know crunchbag is more for old/light computer’s and servers and what the different on this released
they been some bug fixes in the installer on the DVD for the lastest release they had some bug the were having issues installing the Distro an error message appeared just before grub boots up properly!
And other minor changers like?

• Iceweasel 18
• vlc instead of gnome mplayer (popular)
• A Policy Kit Local Authority file has been added to enable easy mounting of internal drives within Thunar
• xfce4-power-manager has been patched to fix a long standing issue whereby the battery status icon would cause a visual error within tint2′s system tray, after a system had been suspended and resumed.

And as well the changers are kept minimum and any other crunchbag users will not need to upgrade to the next version unless they wish to help with test installations proceeding?

• Opensuse 12.3

go and get opensuse while it piping hot
no but opensuse is a redhat base with kde on top of it but what this make it special is the it comes with a package manager which is really good better the (gnome package manager) the fedora uses. it use something called YaST graphical user interface and Zypper as a command line interface so it both worlds plus opensuse has a rolling released distro called tumbleweed the has the latest package bit like (arch)
this beta come with the latest kde 4.10 and as well been ironing bugs and the latest kernel 3.7.1 so more support in arms computer and new support for hardware and as well

• support for metadata checksums and improved quota support in Ext4
• I/O failure statistics, subvolume quotas, quota groups, snapshot diffs, faster fsync and the ability to disable copy-on-write on a per-file base in btrfs
• userspace probes for performance profiling with tools like Systemtap or perf and a new “perf trace” tool modeled after strace.
• Many improvements to networking. The TCP protocol performance work with support for the TCP “Fast Open” mode for both clients and servers and TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827) as well as inclusion of the a “TCP small queues” feature and a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat. Other low-level protocol enhancements include support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections and a new tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 Ethernet packets over UDP. New is experimental SMBv2 protocol support as well as stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS support and the ability to have safe swapping over NFS/NBD.
• The kernel now allows for Android-style opportunistic suspend and has support for suspending to disk and memory at the same time which prevents these “yup, ran out of battery so now you lost data” annoyances with suspend-to-ram.
• In the security area we see added support for signed kernel modules, the Intel “supervisor mode access prevention” (SMAP) security feature, VFIO, which allows safe access from guest drivers to bare-metal host devices and a sandboxing mechanism that allows to filters syscalls.
• Other improvements include the ability to do SCSI over Firewire and USB, support for the PCIe D3cold power state; and the usual huge number of new and improved drivers.

and plus on top of this there will be the latest version of libreoffice so don’t you worry about thing?

• Fedora 18

fedora 18 has been released yesterday with the UEFI secure boot support so any windows 8 computer the has this feature it will work out of the box and a new installer for the the new users to install a lot easier. with advance settings from a new comer from Ubuntu (or any other Ubuntu base distro wants to try something new)?

by default this is what it looks like very nice with the latest gnome 3.6 you are going to be right at home. with this distro and for the people who don’t know gnome. gnome is a desktop interface that use to be popular an till the gnome shell was released but don’t let it fool you this is good to add extra feature like gnome extensions to make that experience a lot better for the people the like’s gnome.

like the installer the installer called (Anaconda)
ok now for the gnome haters cinnamon and mate is been released into there repos by default so you can install mate or cinnamon for a change over or just install the respins it’ s really up to you?
and upgrade feature there is a program called fedup upgrade fedora 18 and as wel can upgrade offline as well so the many updates can still be made on the fly, some packages will require a system restart. The system will boot into a special update mode “in order to avoid problems related to conflicts of libraries and services that are currently running with those on disk

• Fuduntu 2013.1

fuduntu has been updated with the lastest kernel 3.6 with driver support aka (jocky) plus they even released the netflix desktop for useful film watching since the last release they had a power manager called jupiter (mainly for eee pc’s) now that gone because jupiter power managemet development has stopped sorry everyone
if people dont know what fuduntu is well it’s an easy use system (as always) the a rolling released system they use to be base on fedora but now independent it use the gnome2 interface which that good for people who love the gnome 2 interface (sorry mate)