Demystifying Linux: Understanding Open Source, Free Software, and Major Distributions

Are you curious about Linux but feeling overwhelmed by all the terminology and options? Don't worry, we've got you covered! In this blog post, we'll take you on a beginner-friendly journey through the fascinating world of Linux, covering everything from the differences between the Open Source Community and the Free Software Community to the origins of Linux and its major distributions.

First things first, let's clear up the distinction between the Open Source Community and the Free Software Community. While both share a commitment to open collaboration and accessibility of software source code, they approach it from slightly different angles. The Free Software Community, championed by the Free Software Foundation, emphasizes the ethical and philosophical principles of software freedom. On the other hand, the Open Source Community, popularized by figures like Eric S. Raymond, focuses more on the practical benefits of collaborative development and peer review.

Speaking of Eric S. Raymond, he's the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," an influential essay that explores the contrasting development models of proprietary software development (the "Cathedral" model) and open source software development (the "Bazaar" model). Raymond advocates for the merits of open source development, highlighting its collaborative and iterative nature as a powerful alternative to traditional closed-source development methods.

Now, let's talk about Linux. Linux is a Unix-like operating system kernel developed by Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s. It's the heart of many popular Linux distributions, which are essentially different flavors of Linux with their own set of features, goals, and communities. One of the ongoing debates within the Linux community is whether to refer to these distributions simply as "Linux" or "GNU/Linux," acknowledging the significant contributions of the GNU project to the operating system.

Another important kernel in the Unix-like operating system world is the BSD kernel, which originated from the Unix operating system developed at the University of California, Berkeley. While Linux and BSD share similarities, they represent different approaches and philosophies regarding software development, licensing, and freedom.

Finally, we covered some of the major GNU/Linux distributions, also known as "parent" distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, Mageia, and Elementary OS. Each distribution has its own unique characteristics, goals, and target audience, offering something for everyone in the vast and diverse world of Linux.

So whether you're interested in the ethical principles of software freedom, the practical benefits of open collaboration, or simply exploring different Linux distributions, there's a wealth of information and opportunities waiting for you in the Linux community. Dive in, explore, and discover the power of open-source software!

Get your GNU T-shirt

I have designed a GNU-shirt (Gnu T-shirt) and printed limited copies. Front side and back side printed with the GNU Mascot. (You can see the image of the T-shirt in this post.) The material thickness is 180 GSM and the printing process is Double Coated Rubber Printing. Medium / Large / Extra Large sizes available. Almost 30 pieces left right now. Anyone interested, please contact in the following numbers:
Thomas : 9946022032 | Sreekanth : 9895181906
The T-shirts available at Kadavanthra, Ernakulam.

Little Maria wearing the GNU shirt: Facebook album (Login required)

Gnu T-shirt front

Gnu T-shirt Back

Gnu T-shirt Front

Gnu T-shirt close

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Little Maria wearing Gnu T-shirt Medium

Cost of Gnu T-shirt.

Many people call us from all over India. We are happy to send the T-shirt via courier service. If you want to have the T-shirt, please use the "contact" page and give us the details, i.e., desired size of the T-Shirt / how much quantity you want / by which way you are willing to pay cash / by which way you are willing to receive the parcel etc. Hope this will give both of us good clarity. Once we get your email, we will contact you via email instantly.

How to retrieve youtube videos from your browser's cache?

I'll tell you some working methods to download youtube videos withoug having any particular software. But before that just read about the main issues.

I know you have tried many ways to download your favourite youtube video to your hard drive. you may have used many tools for that. But suddenly on one day, your fav tools stop working. Why? Because, youtube changes their technology time to time in caching the videos in your browser. There are many Gnu/Linux based application to download youtube. Clive, gvdown are best examples. My favourite application was Clive. Anyway Clive is no longer works in my machine. To use Clive any longer, I have to upgrade it or re-install it. So I decided to get them without any software. How could I do that?

Whatever file to run in your computer from the internet, it has to cache it first in the local system. May it be a png or gif, flv or mp3 it has to do so. So the site, caches the file in the temp location of your system. In the case of youtube video, you have to find where the file is cached in your local system. Its that simple. Once you find where is the file is cached, you almost got the file. Before proceeding you have to understand the following things to operate.

1. Find out the way to view all cache files in your Mozilla Firefox browser
2. Find out the way to view all cache files in your Computer (Gnu/Linux or Windows or Mac etc)

As of today, you can retrieve the video simply if you correctly follow the following steps

1. Open Mozilla Firefox and in the address bar type as "about:cache" (without quotes)
2. In "Memory cache device", click on "List Cache Entries"
3. Using Firefox "Find" tool, locate your youtube video.
4. Click on a "Key" heavy file size. (say 3725647 bytes)
5. Then you will get enough info on that particular key. Just Right-click on the key and save to the hard disk
6. By default, the file name will be "videoplayback". Rename it with a .flv extension
7. Play it with Mplayer or vlc player
8. If you wish to convert as mp3 or any other formats, use ffmpg.
9. The command to convert as
   ffmpeg -i inpuvvideofile.flv outputaudiofile.mp3
   
10. Thats all. Any doubts?
    

Interaction with RMS

It was on 9th of September 2010. I was anxiously waiting for this day to attend the function in which Richard Matthew Stallman delivering a speech at St. Joseph's College of Engineering and Technology, Palai. The speech was great. I Started from home very early along with my friends at ILUG Cochin. We reached there some hours before the speech. The function was organized amazingly by the Computer Engineering Students. The students started a FSUG (Free Software User Group) in their college and they named it as Swathanthra.in
RMS explained concepts and philosophy of the revolutionary os GNU/Linux. His two hour lecture was really great. He talked about Free-software. He talked about freedom. The ceremonial funny drama had taken place here too, RMS wore a black gown and an old CD as cap and said “I am St. Ignucius of the Church of Emacs and I bless your computer, my child. Long may you run.” In the Q&A session, I wrote a question to him and he answered it very passionately. The question was this -" you totally against to Open Source initiatives and FOSS. The question is asked in the background of a project like OPEN DRM". He answered that he is not AGAINST. Whatever the term may be, the core issue is FREEDOM. After answering the question, he added that "This is a good question". And I did know that he may comment something good to that question, because I have read there were a project like "Open DRM" was in serious consideration in some open source communities, which RMS clearly expressed his strong disapproval against such stupid projects. Even there were some Open Malwares! That question can be extended to such distros like Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL).

After the speech, ILUG Cochin got a chance to meet RMS in person. We took some photographs with him. Anyway, it was my first experience with such an eminent person in the Free Software Community, and the experience was great.

How to recover your grub?

In a GNU/Linux installed system, the default boot record is handled by GRand Unified Boot Loader or GRUB. Originally written by Erich Boleyn, Grub is considered as one of the best boot loaders available. In many circumstances, a boot record can be changed, i.e., another OS installation is one among them. For example, if you install /upgrade Windows 7 in a GNU/Linux installed machine, the GRub will be replaced by Windows' own boot record. From that point you will not be able to load GNU/Linux from your system. Because Windows' boot loader will never load another OS. However, you can easily recover your grub with only two or three lines of commands. It's very easy, it's not so techy. All you need is to have is a Live CD/DVD of GNU/Linux such as Knoppix. Here is the way to recover your grub.
Note: This weblog is written for Debian based text mode GRub recovery
1. Boot the system with Knoppix
2. type fdisk -l Hit enter to get a rough idea about your partitions and corresponding file systems. And just note down the Linux file systmes in a piece of paper.
3. Type grub
4. Type find /boot/grub/stage1 Hit enter
Note: If you get error message (Error 15: File not found) try another location as,
find /grub/stage1 Hit enter You'll probably get a reply from either of these commands just like (hd0,6)


Note: (hd0,6) is an example. hd0 is the drive; ,6 is the partition.
5. Type setup (hd0) Hit enter
Note: you only give drive number only; not the device number
6. You'll see some lines of codes like
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists ... no
Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists ... yes
Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists ... yes
Checking if "/boot/e2fs/stage1-5" exists ... yes
Checking if "/boot/e2fs/stage1-5 (hd0)" exists ...
17 sectors embedded succeeded
Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0)(hd0)1+17P (hd0,6) /grub/stage2 /grub/menu.lst"..
succeeded
Done

IF you can read this message, your grub has recovered.
Now reboot your system.
Remove Knoppix CD.
Boot your hard disk.
Congratulations.
You have recovered your GRand Unified Boot Loader.

andLinux. A great step to Linux-for-all

As an ardent Linux fan, I was always behind Debian for more than last 5 years. I loved the free software concept. And I tried my best to use only free software. As a graphic designer, this would not been always practical. So I had to make compromises several times. I am working in an advertising agency, where they are using only Windows client machines to do the graphic part. I was the person who initiated to move the network system under Linux (Debian). Everybody were happy in using a trouble-free networking environment.
But I had to use Windows to run some graphic software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash etc. Even a dual boot system has its own limitations. It is not practical to switch your system frequently. I was dreaming of a virtual Linus inside Windows, just like Wine. There may be a Line as a counterpart for Wine, I thought and even I googled for Line. I heard about cygwin. Tried to load it to run fontforge. However I kept a Knoppix 5.3 DVD always in my table draw. Whenever I want for Linux, I load it.
One of my favourite Linux applications was Kmymoney2. This software taught me the way to track my income and expenses and helped me a lot to control the spending. I could use Kmymoney only in my home because it does not have a Windows version (but Gnucash has). I inspired many of my friends about Kmymoney and some of them got in tune with it. One day Mr. Saju George (he was my teacher in Debian) called me up and told me that a link has been forwarded to my inbox. The link was of a new distro of Linux which can run inside Windows so that I can use Kmymoney2 in my office computer.
I downloaded it and installed it immediately. Great. Everything was really great. It was not a Virtual Machine as I expected. It was a clean Linux. You can add packages with apt-get install. I installed Kmymoney with its console. But a problem. To run andLinux, you must have admin rights in Windows. Normal user can only get the FLTK console only. I tried all the possible methods, but could not run in normal user mode. But still I think, this can be configured soon. I am really happy anyway. Its a great step in spreading Linux to commoners...

ETTERCAP - POWERFUL ARP SPOOFER

As I always say, you can never rely your privacy on your system. Anybody can access your data without your knowledge. Especially when you chat, when you send an email, anything you upload to a server. In your LAN, if there is any poisoners, s/he can sniff all your privacy. What is the result, loss of your passwords, loss of your peace of mind, loss of your money. Just watch the following article on ettercap - one of the hot ARP Spoofer.

EtterCap is a multipurpose sniffer / interceptor / logger for a switched LAN. It supports active and passive dissection of many protocols (even ciphered ones) and includes many features for network and host analysis.
These features include
1. Characters injection in an established connection: You can inject character to server (emulating commands) or to client (emulating replies) maintaining the connection alive! 2. SSH1 support: you can sniff User and Pass, and even the data of an SSH1 connection. 3. HTTPS support: you can sniff http SSL secured data... and even if the connection is made through a PROXY 4. Remote traffic through GRE tunnel: you can sniff remote traffic through a GRE tunnel from a remote Cisco router and make mitm attack on it 5. PPTP broker: you can perform man in the middle attack against PPTP tunnels 6. Password collector for: TELNET, FTP, POP, RLOGIN, SSH1, ICQ, SMB, MySQL, HTTP, NNTP, X11, NAPSTER, IRC, RIP, BGP, SOCKS 5, IMAP 4, VNC, LDAP, NFS, SNMP, HALF LIFE, QUAKE 3, MSN, YMSG. 7. Packet filtering/dropping: You can set up a filter that search for a particular string (even hex) in the TCP or UDP payload and replace it with yours or drop the entire packet. 8. OS fingerprint: you can fingerprint the OS of the victim host and even its network adapter 9. Kill a connection: from the connections list you can kill all the connections you want 10. Passive scanning of the LAN: you can retrieve info about: hosts in the LAN, open ports, services version, type of the host (gateway, router or simple host) and estimated distance in hop. 11. Check for other poisoners: EtterCap has the ability to actively or passively find other poisoners on the LAN.
Yes. Next time when you get lost into your machine, think about this. Somebody may watching you. Caution! Thats all!

KNOPPIX - WONDERFUL OS

Ever used Knoppix? Or heard about it. It's a wonderful tool for your system. Its a well known OS in the line of Linux Tradition, which you need not to install in your computer's hard drive. Just insert Knoppix into your CD Drive and boot your system. Amazing? Knoppix will load all the drivers automatically. Knoppix is advised, when hard drive crashes, when a test is needed for your entire system or just for a trial. It has a wonderful scintillating Grafik User Interface too. :-)

KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

Knoppix is developed by Klaus Knopper (b. 1968 in Ingelheim) is a German electrical engineer and Linux developer. He received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology (in German: Technische Universität Kaiserslautern), co-founded LinuxTag (a major European Linux expo) and has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998.

KNOPPIX can be downloaded from http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html