To learn Linux you don’t need pen-copy and other stationary at your disposal. Just a cool mind, bubbling with confidence. Get a cup of coffee, sit back and relax. The plane is about to take off!

Learning Linux isn’t getting some specifications. Its a complete Operating system, which has user friendly GUI and has some great OS concepts for the geeks. The former part is not a big deal as its similar to learning windows, the latter part needs to be covered.

Before getting started please read these two FAQ:   FAQ 1 and FAQ 2

1) Get to know about the other distros: Do you know any other distros apart from the distro you are using? Say if you are using Ubuntu, do you know about other famous and friendly distros which are making as much news? Other great distros include Fedora, OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS and some examples of geeky ones are Gentoo, Slackware. Leave these geeky ones if your taste doesn’t match. Be a n00b till you feel free to break out to the wider world.

• List of Distros
• Comparison of Linux Distributions

2) Know about the history of the distro you are using: It may look foolish! What do I have to do with older versions? This is a nice way to know about the trend which your distro is following. What are the features they expect to include in their future releases. What mindset these distros follow while releasing their new versions. What is the release cycle of your distro? What is the next release date? Isn’t it useful? Think twice!

3) Learn about the different desktop Environment: There are many desktop environments available out there which include GNOME,KDE, XFCE. What are their features? What are the specialties? What are their requirements? Which one is lighter, which one heavy? I have hundreds of question to ask, you might be having much more!

4) What is a Kernel: Quite basic but a big geeky question! I have heard people looking at each other’s face when this question is asked and then they look at me. In Layman’s language, we can explain it as a heart of OS. Compare it with engine of a car, where kernel is engine, gasoline is external power, mouse as driving wheel. Oh wait! My explanation is becoming too dumb! There is not just Linux kernel available, search for GNU Hurd and many more kernels available, out of which Linux is most popular. Hey did I mention that Linux is just a kernel, the whole OS is called a “Linux based distro” or simply GNU/Linux.

5) Linux File System: You should learn about the filesystem tree of Linux, how different partitions are mounted/accessed. Did you know that each device connected to the computer is represented by a file, each disk, partition are also represented by a file. These are called special files. Even directories are files, they are infact a file which point to an array of files. Where are all the configuration files stored? Its in /etc. Where are partitions mounted to be accessed (Ans: /media). Where are all the installed software’s executables go? (Ans: /usr) Where are all the device files stored? (Ans: /dev)

6) Permissions: This is one of the biggest hurdles for a newbie coming from windows world. According to him, this one is the most annoying feature at the beginning until he/she learns why is it actually needed. It contributes a lot to the security enjoyed by Linux boxes. You can make a file read-only for others, writable for the whole world or give the write permissions to some limited people by forming a group. Fine tune your policies as you like, nobody gonna stop you anytime.

• Linux File Permission Guide
• Changing File Permissions

7) Root User: If God who holds unchallenged powers exists, then why cant we apply the natural law to this beautiful OS too? There can be many users whose powers are at par with root user,but never equal! Heard about sudo? It’s used by non-root users.This is a keyword to be prefixed before those commands which require root access like installation,network configuration. For this the user must be in sudoers list (by default most users are in this list)

• The Sudo Manual
• What is Sudo in a n00b language

8 ) The different Applications for Linux: Who says that there are shortage for applications/softwares for Linux. Bring him to me, rest I will take care Coming to the point, I can say that there are thousands and lakhs of softwares available all of which are in the repositories. Now what is repositories? Hope you have already checked out the FAQ’s Link given at the start of this article. You don’t need to hunt them down and install, just an apt-get or yum is self sufficient.

• Applications available for Linux
• Some Applications available for both Windows and Linux (some examples)

9) Package Management: This is one topic which I would speak less and ask you to work on more. This is one of those topics which had unlimited theories and similar crap to waste time by writing in the blog. Trying it out hands on would be the best way of learning. Basically there are two types of Package Managers, Debain based which uses APT and Red Hat based which uses YUM. Both are good and provides you alternatives in case you arn’t satisfied with one. I think I have said enough of package management. A Linux software doesn’t come packages as one single exe file. Many different packages constitute an application. Don’t worry about which all packages you need to download, this is the place where package manager comes into play. It resolves all dependencies which are required for installing some simplest to complex software. For more knowledge Click Here

These topics are just pointers for “How to Start? Where to start from?”. It isn’t a complete reference, remember “Google is your Friend”

Wait for another blog post, you would be able to gulp down the second one only if you read this and did tried out yourself most of the things.

Have Fun Mates!

The easiest was will be to install the package http://atrpms.net/dist/f9/synaptics/
or you can do it manually here

edited the /etc/X11/xorg.conf
gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Added the following to the ServerLayout Section
InputDevice “TouchPad” “CorePointer”

add a new section:
Section “InputDevice”
Driver “synaptics”
Identifier “TouchPad”
Option “SendCoreEvents”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
Option “TapButton1″ “1″
Option “TapButton2″ “2″
EndSection

all done logout and login again and everything should be working fine

Update: found the rpm package here

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 today and faced this problem of WiFi again but ths time even installing ndiswrapper diddnt worked so had to find a way to make WiFi work on boot and here it is

For this First You need to install ndiswrapper, no need for net coz the packages are included in the CD / DVD of Ubuntu just go to System>>Administration>>software sources then uncheck all downloadable from internet, Third party and Update repo’s only select Installable from CD-ROM/DVD. Now open a Add/Remove from Applications>>Add/Remove.. there select all avaliable appliactions in show, now seach for ndis you will see Windows Wireless Drivers select it and click Apply changes it will ask you for the CD insert the CD and it will get installed, now you just have to install the drivers of your card for this open System>>Administration>>Windows Wireless Drivers and install the windows wireless drivers ( bcmwl5.inf for hp6515b bcm4312) now follow these steps, type
sudo -i now you must be as root then type
nano /etc/rc.local the file should read
rmmod ndiswrapper
rmmod ssb
modprobe ndiswrapper
exit 0

all done now just reboot and enjoy your Linux……..

Install mpd using your package manager (apt for Debian or Ubuntu users, yum for fedora and so on). Now comes the part of configuring it. If you would run mpd as root, it would read the configuration files from /etc/mpd.conf or otherwise from ~/.mpdconf . You won’t need to make any big changes in the conf file other than the location of music directory. Open up the conf file in an editor and see the line that reads music_directory. Just change the directory to your audio collection. As you would notice, the conf file is commented and it says ‘You can put symlinks in here, if you like.‘ This is pretty useful if your collection is spread over multiple directories. You can always start it by typing mpd at the terminal and kill it using mpd –kill. Remember it would read the appropriate conf file depending on how you are starting the process i.e. as a normal user or as the root.

Note: Your home directory ~ may not contain a .mpdconf directory by default after mpd is installed. In that case create one and for an example conf file, copy the mpd.conf file from /etc/ to ~/.mpdconf

anomit@deadbox:~$ cp /etc/mpd.conf .mpdconf/


Now comes the part of installing a client that would interact with the daemon and play music for you. Install ncmpc, a ncurses based client for mpd using your package manager. Then just start it using ncmpc at the terminal. There is also a GTK+ based client called Sonata which would appeal to you if you are more of a GUI person.

If you would like your current track to be displayed in your pidgin status message and also scrobble to your last.fm account if you have one, install mpdscribble using your package manager and download music tracker, the plugin for pidgin from here.

Configuring mpdscribble
To configure it, you need to compute the md5sum of your last.fm account password. Execute the following at the terminal:

$ echo -n "your-password"|md5sum>file-name.txt
Get the md5sum value from the file and add the follwing lines in the /etc/mpdscribble.conf file

username = user-name
password = md5sum


Now just type mpdscribble at the terminal whenever you want the scrobbling service to start and press Ctrl+C to end it.

Installing musictracker plugin

Extract the contents of the file and cd to the directory where it has been extracted. Run the following commands to install it:

./configure
make
make install

Just check the plugins list in pidgin and enable the musictracker plugin. Configure it according to your wishes.

P.S. By default mpd runs on port 6600 on your system. Could someone try connecting to a running daemon using ncmpc from another laptop on your lan? The appropriate command would be:

ncmpc --host=ip-address --port=6600
where ip-adress would be of the system running the daemon.

Edit your /etc/rc.local file and add the following lines before exit 0

modprobe ath_pci
(sleep 10 && /sbin/iwpriv ath0 mode 3) &


Actually it uses the iwpriv mode X command to lock the card to a specific mode, where
X=0, for a/b/g
1, for a
2, for b
3, for g
You add this to /etc/rc.local to make the change permanent, so that these settings are loaded every time you boot into ubuntu.

Source

MadWifi is one of the most advanced WLAN drivers available for Linux today. It is stable and has an established userbase. The driver itself is open source but depends on the proprietary Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that is available in binary form only.

Ok so lets start, first you need to download the source of Madwifi, go to http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/GettingMadwifi and download tar.gz source package, extract it now open a terminal and login as root by typing su or sudo -i, then goto the madwifi directory and type
cd scripts
./find-madwifi-modules.sh $(uname -r)
cd .. now you are ready to compile
make
now to install type
make install
Now load the module
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci now you can easily connect to the net on your Lenovo R60 lappy
To enable the wifi led just edit /etc/sysctl.conf, type
gedit /etc/sysctl.conf and add this at the end of the file and save
dev.wifi0.ledpin=1
dev.wifi0.softled=1 reboot and thats it enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GETTING LINUX ALTERNATIVES OF YOUR SOFTWARE
So if you really want to switch to Linux, try to get accustomed to Linux alternatives of your software. If you were using Winamp, the alternative is XMMS or Audacious. The replacement of Internet Explorer is Firefox and IceWeasel though Firefox is also available for Windows. It would be better if you spend a week or two using softwares which are available for both Windows and Linux. Some of the examples are:
Firefox- an award winning and largely loved Web Browser
Thunderbird- a portable Mail client
VLC- a highly portable and excellent Media Player
Pidgin – Multi protocol Instant Messenger
Abiword – a lightweight Word processor
OpenOffice – An office suite, installed by default on most Linux distributions
FileZilla – an Open Source FTP client like CuteFTP etc

THE EASE OF INSTALLING SOFTWARES
Installing softwares on windows is claimed to be very simple. You just need to Click on Next and Next and Next. Why click Next so many times if you can install a software with just 2-3 clicks? That even when on windows you have to google desperately on the net to download your software? People usually think that installing software on Linux means compiling from source. I claim this to be a big myth! A really big one! That’s not the case. You also get pre-compiled software packages to just double-click and start, and the better thing is that you wont have to click Next a hundred times.

SOFTWARE PACKAGES
In Linux softwares come as packages. They are not installers in real sense, they contains data which is taken up by the packages installer and now its the packages installer which takes care of the further task. This prevents the package from harming the system if it has some malicious code. It is the work of Package installer to check that malicious code is stopped from executing. Probably the biggest drawback for windows method of installation is the executable installation method, viruses and other malwares may attach themselves to setup files which get executed when you try to install them.

In Ubuntu we have a package manager called APT which is an abbreviation for Advanced Packaging Technology. This utility takes care of all the packages listed on your system. There is another term called repository known as repo in short. Repositories are actually sources of packages, call it as a storehouse. When you add a repository to your package manager and update the list, it fetches the index/list of the softwares present on that repo. It now shows up on the Package manager. Now if you select to install that package it will be fetched from that repository and installed on your system.
A repository can be available anywhere. It can be on a CD, on a website, or a folder on your hard disk.The official Ubuntu repository is very large containing more than 20,000 packages, so one point is very clear “Most of the packages you need will be in the official repo”. This means you wont have to compile any software from source.

There are many package managers available, others being Red Hat Package Manager which is used by Red Hat and its derived distros. Ubuntu is derived from its father distro called Debian which was one of the pioneers in the development of Linux.

METHOD OF INSTALLING
There are two ways of installing any package – Command line way and Graphical way! Its upto you to choose between the two. Each have their own plus and minus points. Graphical method is recommended for a beginner but everyone should have atleast a basic knowledge of command line to deal and cope up with disastrous situations. This is not windows and you wont be reinstalling Linux even in worst situations.

The plus point with graphical method is that its really easy for a beginner to start using and installing any software package. The minus point is that we have to click on search, enter the package name, click on OK, when list comes, select the package, click on Apply and then again OK. It may take time and if you are a bit comfortable with Linux and want to do all these stuff quickly you may prefer command line.
Using command line you may have to just type one command and the software installation starts. You dont need to search,OK, Apply and all those headache. The biggest drawback with this method is that it is a bit tough for a beginner who has never even seen the world of commands on windows.
A Point to note: In future in life you may get stuck up anywhere and may ask help from an expert. Dont expect him to give solutions in graphical mode, rather you will get the solution in commands. The reason is quite obvious – “Why would he type so much like “Click System”, then Package Manager, then enter password and all those long long methods”. You may even get stuck somewhere and say that you didnt find that option. To get over this problem too commands come to rescue. Just copy-paste the command to your terminal, no hassles even, if he tells to give the output, just copy-paste back the output. Its so simple, a single command did all that was required even though you might have found that command very absurd and unusual to look at.

SOFTWARE UPDATES
In windows you had needed to update each application separately, this is not the case in Linux. Here updates arrive via the central “Update Manager” just like “Windows Update”. Unlike windows software updates, kernel updates, security patches and software patches, all comes via this method. If you had installed a software say “ABC” from a official repository “XYZ”, then when an update arrives on that repo, the Update Manager fetches the index of the updates and notifies you. This is an excellent way rather than checking and updating each software manually

Well after going through a large number of guides like this i finally thought about giving guide at cchtml a try, well the hings mentioned are really great but not all steps are needed so here is a simplified version

Here i assume that you have not done any of this step before and are doing it for the first time but if that is not the case then this might not work for you.
Ok so first step installation of drivers, there are two steps for this as mentioned in the cchtml wiki one automatic and other manual, for automatic you need to enable the restricted repositories by going to System>>Administration>>Software Sources, and the typing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-generic restricted-manager
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
which will install the drivers by downloading them from net, if you dont have the bandwidth to download that much you can go for the manual install where we will build those file, here i assumed that you have copy of the ati drivers .run file which if your Ubuntu is installed by me could be found at “/”, to build we need to install certain packages
sudo apt-get install module-assistant build-essential fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++5 linux-headers-generic dkms
to build the packages type
sudo bash ati-driver-installer-8.443.1-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/gutsy
in the directory where you have the ati-driver-installer-8.443.1-x86.x86_64.run file, this is the latest file at the time of writing but you might have a different file this will work with any driver after 8.38, as they have AIGLX support anyway now we need to install the packages made type
sudo dpkg -i xorg-driver-fglrx_8.443.1-1*.deb fglrx-kernel-source_8.443.1-1*.deb fglrx-amdcccle_8.443.1-1*.deb
when you do that you might be asked
Configuration file `/etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager'
==> Deleted (by you or by a script) since installation.
==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
Y or I : install the package maintainer’s version
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
D : show the differences between the versions
Z : background this process to examine the situation
The default action is to keep your current version.
*** compiz-manager (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?
just answer Y to the question and proceed, once this is done you now need to edit the xorg.conf file type
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
and replace
Section "Device"
Identifier “Generic Video Card”
Driver “vesa”
BusID “PCI:1:5:0″
EndSection
WITH
Section "Device"
Identifier “Generic Video Card”
#Driver “vesa”
BusID “PCI:1:5:0″
Option “VideoOverlay” “on”
Option “OpenGLOverlay” “off”
EndSection now just restart the X server but pressing Ctrl + ALT + Backspace, all done this will give you the Basic 3D effects but who is satisfied with that we need more so we will go for installing Compiz settings manager, for this type
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager gcompizthemer subversion
svn ls https://svn.generation.no/emerald-themes
now accept the certificate and fetch the themes by going to System>>Preferances>>Emerald Themes Manager,
to enable 3D effects go to System>>Preferances>>Appearance then Visual Effects select Custom and edit your settings by Preferances
now you are all set to blow everyone up with your Linux box’s 3D effects enjoy

To install WAMP check this post. Click Here

To install LAMP check this post. Click Here

Apache is a webserver whose work is to accept connections and provide you the page which you intend to open. e.g. You want to open a page abc.php , then you ask the webserver to provide you this page. webserver fetches this page from the hard disk, executes it and returns the result to you. The concept is quite simple.

Next lets move on to PHP translator. Every high level language needs a translator to convert it to low level language which the computer can understand. The translator is a generic term. C has a translator which is called *compiler*. PHP does not have a compiler. Instead it has a interpreter. When the php pages are executed over apache the php interpreter is called into service.

Next and last is MySQL. This is the far and most simple system software. It work is just to fetch the data which has been requested when the php scripts are being executed. You need to connect to this software using a username and password to gain authorization. This method prevents misuse and theft of highly critical data. A database can have multiple users, each of them maybe assigned databases exclusively or shared.

Whenever you go to install any php software, you can be asked some server information. They can be:

Database Host: Enter localhost in this field. localhost is the hostname for the IP 127.0.0.1 . It means the database software is on the same computer on which apache is running.

Database User: The username which you need to connect to you database. You can create a new user. All database have a root user which is the super-administrator.

Database Password: Enter you password for the user you provided. The default installation of WAMP has a blank password for root user. Means a string of zero length which is equal to leaving the field blank. For LAMP, you have to set the root password at the time of installation.

Your email Id: Just enter the email id for your installation or admin user. This may not be useful for installation which have been done locally as you cannot send mails from your computer (you dont have an SMTP server running).

Most of the PHP apps coming these days are very simple to install, only place where people get stuck up are these infos.

You can try installing a few PHP apps like MediaWiki, phpBB 3, Wordpress. If you have any problems just comment and keep a check.