EssentiaLinux.com

Howto articles and tips for linux beginners. Most of this information was gathered from my own personal experience maintaining my home linux desktop. I have used mostly Fedora Core and Kubuntu, so this information will mostly pertain to them. If I know that information is specific to a particular distro, then I will mention it. If you see any errors, please take the time to email me and let me know. I take no responsibility for giving bad advise: I am also a beginner and have made quite a few mistakes. I hope to help you avoid them, but I promise nothing. Enjoy!

Beginner Topics

Intermediate Topics

The Importance of Locale
Getting To Know The Command Line
Startup Scripts
The Pico Text Editor

Advanced Topics

Cron Jobs
Bash Scripting
The VI Text Editor

Linux Migration

Windows Equivalent Software Guide
Konqueror instead of Windows Explorer
/home instead of C:
KDE Desktop instead of Windows Desktop
That way in Windows -> This way in Linux
The Kedit Text Editor instead of Notepad
The Gimp instead of Photoshop
From Microsoft Office to Open Office
Using Amarok in Place of Windows Media Player
Firefox instead of Internet Explorer

Users Posts

Post a screenshot of your desktop!
Post your linux migration success story!
Why did you switch to Linux?
Why did you leave Microsoft, or not consider their OS in the first place?
Why did you leave Macintosh, or not consider OS-X in the first place?

Desktop Linux News

KDE 3.5.5 released

KDE 3.5.5 is primarily a bugfix and maintenance release. Notable new features are Kopete 0.12.3 and tuning of KHTML.

Free Open Office training courses

The good folks at Resolvo have released Flash-based training videos for OpenOffice2. I have tested the videos, and find them very informative, but they seem to be aiming for people with little to no computer-use experience. The videos force the user to actually follow the steps outlined in a mock-up of OOo2, rather than just telling the user how to do what he needs. This hand-holding will frustrate experienced users.

GoogleEarth for Linux: native QT

Less than a month after Googles' release of Picasa for Linux, the internet giant has released GoogleEarth for Linux. Unlike Picasa, which runs on a custom heavily-tested version of wine, GoogleEarth is a native Linux application built on QT. Like it's Windows counterpart, GoogleEarth for Linux requires at least 512 MB of RAM and a 3D video card. The app is not open source, however, and has a fairly restrictive license regarding using and ditributing the software. Still, for home users who want to install software on only one machine and are not concerned with hacking the source or redistribution, the GoogleEarth license should be no deterent to using the highly informative and entertaining software.

Warnings of Open Office virus proven false

For the second time this year, Kaspersky Labs have been trying to get themselves in the news. This time, the company claims to have come across an Open Office macro virus. Kaspersky engineer Kostya apparently took the definition of the word "virus" even further this month than his company did last time when he calls a macro written in Star Basic a virus when it is able to display an image from the web. The macro cannot reproduce itself (therefore, it is not a virus) and cannot run malicious code (therefore, cannot harm the machine it is operating under). Furthermore, when Open Office opens a document containing the macro, as it does with every document containing macros, a warning is displayed to the user that the document contains a macro. The user is then propted as to whether or not he wants the macro executed (default is no). Why is Kaspersky so desperate to find viruses where there are none?

Now for Linux: Google Picasa

Finally, Google Labs have released their popular Picasa Photo Organizer for Linux. Instead of modifying the applications core code, Google engineers have modified the Wine code to better work with Picasa. More than 100 bugs have been closed as a result of their efforts- and that will benefit all apps that run in Wine. In addition to the source code, end users can download .deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu machines, and .rpm packages for Red Hat, Fedora, Suse and Mandriva machines.
2006-5-28

False warnings over Lin/Win virus

Kaspersky Labs have been crying wolf over cross-platform viruses. The company claims to have developed a virus that runs on both Linux and Windows machines. While little details about the virus's performance on Windows were released, on Linux the virus has to be downloaded by name, chmoded, and then executed. Even then, it can affect only other files in it's own directory, and cannot reproduce. While the ability to affect other files would classify this program as malicious, it certainly is not a virus as it cannot spread, and cannot be installed/ run without operator knowedge. In fact, the operator has to work hard to get it to run at all.