The Linux page
Will be updated frequently

Introduction:
If you are new to Linux operating system, like me, then this page is for you. I had a personal computer (desktop) with Windows 98 and Windows XP intalled on it (dual booting). I was able to convert it into a multiple boot machine i.e. Windows98, WindowsXP, Ubuntu (a distribution of Linux operating system) and simplyMEPIS (another flavour or distribution of Linux). An HP notebook (laptop), pavilion dv4000 with WindowsXP, home edition (40 GB hard drive) was converted into a dual boot sytem, UBUNTU and Windows; afterwhich it was converted into a multi-boot machine (Windows XP in 15 GB hard drive partition, PCLOS 2007 with updates- in 5 GB hard drive partition, UBUNTU 6.06 LTS with updates in about 7 GB and openSuse with updates- in about 10 GB). Another notebook (Asus F5 series, model F5R) was convertef into an only Linux multiple boot machine with the following distributions installed on it: simplyMepis 7.0, openSUSE 10.3, Mandriva 2008 and PCLOS 2007. The 2 laptops (ASUS and HP) were connected together through the Ethernet card and socket to form a peer-to-peer 2-computer LAN, with Asus acting as printer server and HP as internet gateway, as shown in the following sketch:

As we are getting closer to the end of 2009 and the beginning of a new year 2010, I thought of updating certain operating systems on the above laptops.
  1. Installed PCLOS (GNOME) 2009 on Assus (in place of PCLOS 2007)
  2. Installed MEPIS Linux 8.0.10 on Assus (in place of MEPIS 7.0)
  3. Installed UBUNTU 9.04 on HP (in place of UBUNTU 6.06 LTS)
  4. Made HP the internet gateway as well as the printer server
Mepis is communicating fully with Windows XP (to go out to the iternet, to access shared documents as well as printing on X1270), getting the best of both worlds. Though it has limited communication with Ubuntu, accessing only shared files. On the other hand PCLOS is accessing the intenet through Ubuntu (masquerading) and printing documents on X1270.
Recently, I was able to obtain a couple of netbooks: HP Mini and Acer Aspire One, each has 1 GB RAM and a hard drive with 160 GB capacity. The Mini was converted into a dual boot machine Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 (a linix distro). On the other hand, the Aspire was converted into a multiboot linux only machine having the Mandriva 2010, Ubuntu 9.10 and PCLOS-GNOME 2010.





WiFi LAN: As now there are more than netbook and a laptop, it is obvious to build a wireless local area network having the PCs accessing the internet through the wireless router and the modem as well as seeing and communicating with each other and using a network printer (connected to one of them). The configuration is a star where the router is the hub.
  • Connect your PC (or laptop) to a high speed internet connection (eg. ADSL, using a DSL router for example).
    		•
  • Using the internet search engines eg. Yahoo, Google,..etc., find the sites to download the ISO images of the Linux operating system ditributions that you want to download.
    		•
  • Download the pertinent files (operating system ISO image), preferably the live CD ones. With the CD live version, you can run the operating system from the CD discover how user friendly it is and what it can do (from the CD-ROM drive or DVD) before installing it on the hard drive of your PC, notebook or laptop.
    		•
  • Download also the checksum files md5s or sha1 (usually in text format).
    		•
  • Verify the integrity of downloaded ISO image files, by running the MD5SUM (cyclic redundancy check) checksum on the downloaded ISO files and comparing it with those given in the MD5S text files already downloaded.
    		•
  • Burn the ISO image files (the size of the OS image is about 700 MB) to a CD.
    		•
  • Reboot your machine with the CD having the Linux (operating system image on) in the CD ROM drive of your machine. When it starts up, the machine has to be able check the CD drive before the hard disk and to boot from the CD drive.
    		•
  • When the machine reboots it starts with the Linux operating system, you can play verify, connect to the internet and examine the OS and the associated software packages available from te CD.
    		•
  • If you decide to install the OS on your hard disk to get the maximum out of it, click the install icon on the desk top and follow the installation screens until you have the Linux OS installed on your PC or laptop. When you reboot you will have the option to start (boot) your machine with Windows or Linux OS..
    		•
  • When you are in Linux operating system, you can add additional programs and software packages to the already installed ones. This is done through either downloading the appropriate files from the internet (and using the pertinent method or commands, function of the file extension) to install them or through the use of Synaptic package manager (that downloads the selected packages, installs them on your machine and keep track of them as well).
    		•
    The common software packages available with Linux operating system are text editors & word processing, spread sheet, database, games, internet browsers, graphics, CAD, GIS, presentation, desktop publishing, project management, office packages (suites), programming & scripting languages and IDE & development tools. Text editors & word processing programs may include but not limited to gedit, mousepad, leafpad, kedit, kate, kwrite, scribes, tea text editor, kword, abiword word processer and openoffice writer. Spread sheet programs may include openoffice calc, kspread and gnumeric. Database programs are openoffice base, knoda and kexi, not to mention mySQL or postgres. The games are arcade. board games, card games and tactics & strategy. The internet browsers may be Seamonkey, Navigator, Mozilla, Firefox, Flock, Opera, Arora and Epiphany browsers. The graphics programs are dia, synfigstudio, blender, krita, kolourpaint, gpaint, ooo draw, inkscape, skencil, mirage, gimp and showfoto. The CAD programs are pythonCAD, xcircuit, qucs, pcb, ksimus, kiCAD, qCAD and electric cad. The GIS are qgis and grass software. The presentation programs are openoffice impress, kpresenter and criawips. The desktop publishing software is scribus. The project management programs are planner, kplato, taskjuggler and IPDesktop. The programming languages may be C++, Java, SmallEiffel ADA, Ocaml, Haskell and free pascal. The scripting languages are perl, python, tcl/tk, ruby and, rexx. The IDEs (integrated development environments) are netbeans, eclipse, mingw developer studio, qt designer, kdevelop, pida, eric, kompozer, gazpacho, geany, drPython, spe, anjuta, Idle, gambas, quanta and screem. For the multimedia players, there are: Miro, Amarok, kaffeine, juk, kmplayer, mplayer, realplay, noatun, kaboodle and Totem movie player. There are also languages and programs dedicated to math and plotting like octave, labplot, grace, ygraph, kmplot, geg and graphThing.
    Blueprint for downloading, installing and using Linux operating systems:
    1) Internet connection: it has to be of the high speed type (ADSL).ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, or DSL for short) is a high-speed Internet access service that utilizes existing copper telephones lines to send and receive data at speeds that far exceed conventional dial-up modems. The fastest dial-up modems are rated at 57 kilobits per second (Kbps), and usually operate at about 53 Kbps under good conditions.
    Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), a modem technology, converts existing twisted-pair telephone lines into access paths for multimedia and high-speed data communications. ADSL can transmit up to 6 Mbps to a subscriber, and as much as 832 kbps or more in both directions. Such rates expand existing access capacity by a factor of 50 or more without new cabling. ADSL is literally transforming the existing public information network from one limited to voice, text and low resolution graphics to a powerful communication system capable of bringing multimedia, including full motion video, to everyone's home this century. In certain areas and due to limitations in infrastructure, the speed of transmission can be 512 kbps or 256 kbps. Still under these conditions the download speed of files over the internet can be 62 or 31 kbps, respectively (i.e. a 700 MB file would take 3 or 6 hours,respectively, to download).
    2) Using the internet search engines: using any of the web search engines (eg. Yahoo, Google,..etc., the one you most comfortable with), enter the name of the Linux operating system that you are looking for and you want to download (eg. simplymepis, ubuntu, fedora, PCLOS, opensuse, centos, gentoo, mandriva, or any other linux distribution for that matter).Bookmark (as favourite) such sites and read through their pages to get more information regarding the capabilities of each of such distributions.
    3) Downloading the ISO image files: when you decide on the distributions you would like to have, proceed to the mirror site (closest to you, if applicable) and downnload the image file. An ISO is a file that contains the complete image of a disc (from sector 0 to the end). Such files are often used when transferring CD (or DVD) images over the internet and are commonly used as a way of offering Linux distributions for download. Once you have an ISO imge on your hard drive, you can burn it onto a CD (or a DVD) using one of many ISO-burning software packages (will be covered in point 6 below).
    4) Downloading the md5 and/or sha1 ascii files: from the same directory where you downloaded the ISO image file, you can download the pertinent (correspond to the image file downloaded) md5sum or sha1 ascii (text) file that have the file signature (a 32 or 40 alpha-numeric characters & digits).
    5) Verification of ISO image file integrity: there are certain software packages (utility programs) that calculate the message digest (md) Before you burn your CD, it a good idea to check the integrity of the downloaded ISO IMAGE to make sure that it is not corrupted and when burned to the CD will boot-up.This can be done using md5sum or sha1sum. When you perform such check, you are ctually comparing the "unique" signature of the downloaded file (that you have on your hard drive) with that on the server (the original one) To perform an md5sum (or sha1sum) check on the downloaded file, you need the file you downloaded in step 4 above and the md5sum (or sha1sum) program (examplefor such programs are fastsum, graphical md5sum and md5 command line mdssage digest utility).You run the program that checks the signature of the Linux OS image file. Verify that the output of the program equal the value found in the signature file downloade in step 4 above.If both values are equl, then you can peoceed to burn the image onto a CD. Otherwise, you have to re-download the image file and recheck its signature as explained above.
    6) Burning ISO image files: to create a bootable CD (or DVD) from an ISO image, you must burn the actual ISO image onto the CD (NOT JUST COPY THE ISO FILE TO THE CD). There many software packages that can burn ISO image files onto CDs. Two examples will be given hereafter namely Nero Express (Ahead software) and ISO recorder V2 power toy on Windows (XP with service pack 2, v3 for Windows Vista and V1 for Windows XP SP1). With Nero Express, the folowing procedure can be followed:t o burn the image file onto a CD, insert a blank media into the CD writer. Launch Nero, Select "dis image or saved project". An Open dialog appears, select the ISO image you want to burn.click open. The next screen allows you to select the Writing Speed.The best setting is based on the actual hardware. if you have any problems with the default valu, try slower speeds. Click Next to burn. With Windows ISO recorder, Click start, then click my computer. click on the image file yo want to burn to the CD, then either click file on the menu or right click the image file. From either choose, choose copy image to CD. Then follow the step given by the CD Recording Wizard pop-up.
    7) Rebooting the PC/laptop from the CD drive: after burning the image of LINUX OS distribution onto the CD, place the CD into the drie and reboot your machine. The PC/laptop must be capable of checking the CD drive before the hard drive and as well as booting from the CD drive.
    8) Examining the Linux operating system: Now you have Linux in control of your machine where you can check, try the software packages available from the CD as well as accessing the internet.
    9) Installing the Linux OS on your hard drive: if you decide to have another operating system on your machine (to have dual or multiple boot machine), you can follow the instructions (given in the documents relevant to your distribution) and proceed with the installation of your Linux distribution.
    10) Adding more software packages to Linux OS: the addiyion of software packages can be achieved either by using the (synaptic) package manager or Yast (recommendeed as well as preferred methods) or by downloading the proper and suitable files, for your distribution, over the internet and installing them.

    This page will have the following sections:


    Home of the Virtual Electrical Power Institute (VePi)