“Linux doesn’t have viruses at all!”

Most of the time this is just a case of over simplification made by ‘Linux people’ in order to convince Windows people to try Linux. The truth is that there are about 30 viruses for Linux. I know this number sounds extremely large, but bear with me.

The trick is that there aren’t any viruses in circulation – that can currently infect systems and are present on USB sticks, malicious servers, etc. In fact, most of those viruses are gathering dust somewhere on a floppy disk. How come there are so few viruses for Linux? Linux is radically different from Windows because:

1. The source code is freely available, which means more eyeballs are staring at the code, ever since the 90’s, continually improving it. On the other hand, it’s a felony to decompile or reverse engineer any component of Windows. Which means only  Microsoft employees and hackers see the code.
2. Linux was built with security in mind. Windows started paying attention to security well after Windows NT. Like putting the money into the bank and installing the safe afterwards: the robbers came and went.
3. And even then, they set the combination on the lock to ‘1234’.
4. On any modern Linux OS, you get updates for the system as well as for the apps, automatically. On Windows, every app has its updater program, which isn’t as robust or reliable.
5. Multiple Linux package managers means that a Debian virus can’t infect a Mandriva system. To cover all the major Linux distributions, a virus programmer needs to write the same virus about 5 times.

Linux can however store the Windows virus executables without getting infected itself. Which is why the bad guys use Linux themselves. Smart, isn’t it?

The structure of Linux makes writing a virus very difficult as it requires root access to do anything of significance. For a virus to run it would have to be granted root access with a password request. If you fail to give it root access then the most a virus could do, if anything, is damage your home directory. It is unlikely it could even run again so it would die there in your home directory. Most smart Linux users grasp the power of root access and would question why an unknown program is suddenly requesting root access. (You don’t enter your password for just ANY prompt do you? Only for programs YOU have called up, right?) –BrunoLinux

There’s a Linux antivirus called Clam AntiVirus. Which is completely useless, because finding a Linux virus in the wild is like finding a unicorn in your backyard.

Windows fanatics, please leave angry thoughts using the comment form below. Yes, make the pain go away.

A little history

On June 6th, 2008, Google Gadgets Team:

The Windows and Mac versions of Google Desktop has provided gadget hosting functionality on Windows and Mac for a while now and the Linux version of Google Gadgets will extend this platform to Linux users. By enabling cross-platform gadgets, a large library of existing gadgets are immediately available to Linux users. In addition, gadget developers will benefit from a much larger potential user base without having to learn a new API.

Google Gadgets for Linux is an open source project available under the Apache license. The Google Open Source blog invites everyone to contribute with bug reports and fixes on Google Code.

Installation

Binaries

Depending on your linux distribution, you can either opt to install via the binary packages, which are available for Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 8/9, openSUSE 10.3/11, Slackware and FreeBSD on this page.

For Ubuntu, the Google Code page points to a SuSE repository; Installing using these binaries is a bit disappointing – with no more than 8 packages to download and manually install. A better solution is via GetDeb.

Build from source code

If you want to get your hands dirty and compile Google Gadgets yourself, here’s the step by step process. You can read through the whole (very long) How-to Build Guide here.

• wget http://google-gadgets-for-linux.googlecode.com/files/google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.3.tar.bz2
• tar zxvf google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.3.tar.bz2
• cd google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.3/
• sudo apt-get install build-essential zip flex desktop-file-utils shared-mime-info zlib1g-dev libxml2-dev libdbus-1-dev libx11-dev libxt-dev libltdl3-dev (for Ubuntu 8.04) or libltdl7-dev (for Ubuntu 8.10) libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev network-manager-dev libstartup-notification0-dev xulrunner-1.9-dev libgtk2.0-dev librsvg2-dev ibcurl4-gnutls-dev or libcurl4-openssl-dev libqt4-dev
• sudo ldconfig
• ../../configure –enable-debug
• sudo make install
• export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
• ggl-gtk

Interface & Usability

They UI remains pretty much unchanged from the Windows version, and requires a compositioning engine like Compiz for the effects. There’s nothing really ground-breaking here – the same black transparent sidebar we all know.

• You can run “ggl-gtk –ns” to run the widget engine without the sidebar.
• You can load the widgets at start-up automatically by adding them to the ‘Sessions’. See above screenshot.
• The gtk version did not slow down my start-up time, and the app didn’t crash. Some of the widgets specifically designed for windows may not work properly but do not hang the program.
• For every widget not created by Google a pop-up appears notifying you.
• Installation of new widgets doesn’t take more than 3-5 seconds.

Conclusion

While some may argue that screenlets, widgets and gadgets are a waste of workspace and resources I have some good uses for them:

• I keep 3 clocks with the West Coast/Central and East Coast time + London. This is extremely useful when publishing and calling overseas relatives.
• Google Calendar tells me what classes I have to attend during the day; when are the articles due.
• The battery meter gives a more clear look at the status so I don’t have to squint at the monitor.
• Ah, and the plant is really cute.

Why is everyone obsessed with having the weather on their desktop? If I want to know today’s weather, I look out of the window.             -oobuntu

• The weather widget helps me pick the right clothes for the day – by giving me the high and the low.

Different people have different uses – so I want to hear from you. Are widgets useful?

Launched about 2 years ago,

It’s one of the most community driven distributions. You could literally post an idea in the forums today and see it implemented the week after in the “current” release. Of course this has pros and cons and compared to distributions with roadmaps, feature boards and fixed release cycles we miss a lot of structure and potentially a lot of quality, but it allows us to react quickly, implement more innovations and make the whole experience for us and for the users extremely exciting. –Linux Mint Team

I’m your father, Linux Mint!

While ignoring the reference to Star Wars, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), which guarantees  long term-support, APT package manager with the huge library and the best hardware compatibility so far.

Linux Mint benefits from the huge Ubuntu community, forums, websites; almost all tutorials written for Ubuntu work with Linux Mint.

Installation

Getting Linux Mint is fairly easy process: hit the download link, burn the .iso image and boot from the CD. You’re greeted with a fully functional desktop and a choice to install it – the same Ubuntu wizard we’re used to.

There’s no noticeable difference in boot-up time or install time, considering you’re getting a lot of extras from the start.

What’s new?

Booting up Linux Mint is like Christmas morning, and it’s not just eye candy either. There’s no need to manually install ubunru-restricted-extras to bring in those essential packages.

• Out of the box support for media playback, everything from .xvid to .avi, mp3 and flac. Default player: Rhythmbox, MPlayer.
• Easy wizard for installing proprietary ATI/nVidia drivers, with some additional options not included in the default Hardware Drivers app. Default player: MPlayer.
• Sun Java and Adobe Flash support out of the box.
• Drops the Ekiga package and adds an IRC client.
• Compiz Settings Manager: Allows advanced configuration options to the compositioning engine.
• Mint Update: An application specifically written from Linux Mint that allows users to install updates while providing a safety-level indicator, allowing un-experienced users to skip updates that may need further configuration or are not compatible with Mint.
• Mint Desktop: A configuration tool for various settings regarding the desktop. Makes useful stuff like hiding the mounted devices a one click affair.
• Mint Assistant: A first-time configuration tool that let’s you choose to enable the root password and terminal quotes.
• Mint Install: Allows installation of new applications from a simple 3 tab interface: .mint, getdeb.net and the APT repository. Useful for newbies, and definitely faster than loading Synaptic Package Manager.

Mint Backup: Easy wizard for setting up a backup.

User interface

From freedom, comes elegance.                              -Linux Mint motto

Initially skeptical about the elegance part, once it booted-up I was in love. The attention given to every aspect of the interface is unbelievable. From the GRUB boot logo to the login, and desktop, everything  inspires elegance. Even the start-up sound is nice – the first time I didn’t disable it.

The main menu resembles KDEs’ implementation – which initially made me wonder if this is Gnome.

Linux Mint’s purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.   -Linux Mint Team

Caveats

No operating system is perfect, and Linux Mint is no exception.

• Not up-to-date with with the latest improvements in Ubuntu – 8.10 features like the new Network Manager are not yet implemented.
• Doesn’t have the commercial backing of a corporation like Canonical or Novell.
• The release schedule fluctuates. New features might be just around the corner or not implemented at all.
• Google Custom Search instead of Google in Firefox. Can be fixed with ‘Add to search bar’ addon.

Conclusion

A lot of people may argue that the changes in Linux Mint are not that innovative or new. Some people will argue that you could spend a couple of hours and mod the Gnome panel to resemble Mints’. You can install all the Mint apps for Ubuntu. You can install ubuntu-restricted-extras  by yourself.

But that takes time – and why waste that when you can have everything you need out of the box? Linux Mint convinced me, and now has its own partition.

Visit Linux Mint website.

What about you? Are you happy with Ubuntu as it is? Share in the comments.

In this article, we’re going to look at the top reasons behind Ubuntu’s success and discuss what’s next for the linux community.

Availability

The principle is simple: the lower the barrier of entry, the more users you’ve got. Ubuntu is very easy and convenient to get:

• Shipit: Sends you free CD’s via mail.
• Downloads: Both torrent and FTP, with mirrors around the world, extremely fast – in my case over 1Mbit/second. You are presented with an .ISO file that can be easily transferred to a CD.
• Pre-loaded on PC’s – installed on compatible hardware, the best choice for non-technical people, available from Dell and others.

Reliability

Ubuntu is backed by Canonical, a company who’s primary focus is to promote its use. They made possible:

• Sustained development schedule
• Fast updates
• Organized and unified community

Canonical can afford promoting Ubuntu by cashing in on Professional Support services, and their whole business objective is making it as popular as possible.

Community

Unity was something a lot of Linux fans were waiting for, and were quick to adopt Ubuntu. By the time of their third release, they had thousands people on the bandwagon – and a tight knit community.

• Forums: Thousands of tutorials, help topics and discussions, virtually anything you need can be found on the Ubuntu Forums.
• Bug Tracker: The Bug Tracker is super-easy to use and lots of people contribute by finding and reporting bugs; coders with some free time often create ad-hoc scripts to fix problems. Some even contribute with drivers.
• Blogs: A lot of geeks, just like you and me, took matters into their own hands and started publishing for Ubuntu users – insights into features, tutorials and reviews; creating massive exposure.

Something I missed I my analysis, eloquently  expressed by weizbox in the comments:

Advertising, clearly. The distro itself doesn’t really separate itself much from the other major desktop distros in terms of hardware compatibility or special features, since all the major desktop distros all are essentially build on the same packages, just perhaps different versions depending on the release. Occasionally there will be some differences, like with the new BBC plugin (which others would have more easily at this point if it weren’t for the Ubuntu devs using apt code instead of a standard, like PackageKit) and the new Guest account (previously, only a ~3-click process).

Another interesting point of view from Darkhacker:

- Releases: The release schedule is predictable and releases are made often.
- Software: Ubuntu comes with very sane defaults and I don’t need to remove a ton of packages or spend all day downloading more packages to get my desktop the way I like it. They have also found a good balance between stable and up-to-date software. Fedora can be a little too bleeding edge at times and other distros are behind the times.
- APT: I just like APT better. I’ve always used Debian based distros.
- Single CD: One of my dislikes about Suse and Fedora is it comes on like 5 CDs. Yes I could get the DVD or I could just download a portion of the CDs but that’s really retarded to me. It’s wasting bandwidth on packages I’ll never want or need. Plus, some older computers only have a CD drive (no DVD) and it’s easier to handle a single disk.
- Support: 18 months for regular releases and 36 months for LTS. It’s nice knowing that I’m not rushed to upgrade.
- Popular: Sort of a chicken-and-egg scenario but I started using Ubuntu because I saw it was number one on Distrowatch. That creates a great community and means that I’ll get a well tested distro with lots of community support.
- Company Backing: We can sit around the camp fire and talk about “power to the people”, but I really like company backing. If a company (in this case Canonical) is backing a distro, I have more faith in the quality of maintenance (releasing security updates for all packages, reliable update servers, etc) than if It’s being run by a couple guys in their spare time. Who knows if they’ll continue to support it. What if they miss a security update for a package in their repos?
Yes I know that a few other distros meet some of these criteria, but Ubuntu hits them all.

And from MaxMWood:

Lets just make it clear that it’s popular only within Linux distros. Nothing else.

What’s next?

In the light of recent events, both from Apple and Microsoft, how would you see the future of linux? Will Windows 7 be a flop, will it generate a massive wave of switchers the open source community was waiting for?

I think the progress will be incremental – and the principles and ideas behind the open source philosophy will ultimately make the difference.

What made you switch to Ubuntu?

1. ubuntu-restricted-extras – Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio formats (gstreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts,
Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files),
and DVD playback.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

2. NTFS-Config – manage your NTFS formatted drives easily without manually editing fstab. Add/remove drives, create mount points and enable external NTFS write support. Great when dealing with NTFS partitions on a dual boot system. Much better than manually editing /etc/fstab .

sudo apt-get install ntfs-config

3. Better sticky notes – an easy addon for the main toolbar gives you one click access the yellow goodness. It’s time to leave behind the paper ones and save some trees.

4.Upgrade without burning the Ubuntu CD – why waste that CD and the time it takes to burn it when you can upgrade from the command line? Downloading all the packages and installing them may take a while, a decent broadband connection is recommended.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

5. Better photo management – Picasa, Google’s photo management software.

Download Picasa Linux source code from here, then compile using this tutorial.

The interface  is great, it has basic photo fixes for white balance, contrast, crop etc. and even effects. Prints, emails and uploads directly to Blogger and Picasa Web Albums.

6. Better music jukebox and video player – Amarok and VLC.

Amarok is by far the most advanced player out there, although it’s a bit unstable under Gnome.

sudo apt-get install amarok

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. VLC supports a lot of themes and decodes everything from avi to matroska.

sudo  apt-get install vlc

7. Hardware testing – Let the developers know about your hardware – what works and what doesn’t, so they can fix it.

Main Menu>System>Hardware Testing

It’s a 2 minute wizard that guides that tests audio, display, networking and mouse/keyboard and then send the results, a list of your computer’s hardware and your comments to the developers.

Bonus Tip – The Matrix on your desktop:

Main Menu>System>Preferences>Screensaver

Are we living in a simulation? We are certainly capable of creating such a system, just look at Spore. Now imagine the computing power 50 years from now. Scary, huh?

In this article we’re going through 7 most requested Ubuntu features that didn’t make the cut in this release.

1. A better User Interface

As it is, Ubuntu is a great operating system, it’s based on the Unix core, it’s stable, lightweight, secure, we all know that list of features, that’s why we love Ubuntu.

But, imagine what a better interface would do for Ubuntu, something sexy and usable, while maintaining the low system requirements – a big stepping stone on the way to beat Mac and Windows and reach through to the home users.

We really have to create something better in order to persuade the average Joe, which doesn’t quite grasp the ‘under the hood’ advantages of Ubuntu.

And it wouldn’t be a very complicated task, we already have all the basics in place: Compiz for effects, screenlets and a great array of dock applications. There are all these tutorials out there written by Ubuntu users customizing their box – what would it take to integrate that into the default install?

Let’s keep it simple and beautiful.

‘I would love it if these designs received some serious consideration, Ubuntu appears to be just content to settle for the poor and unattractive orange designs. Whilst the current Ubuntu designs have worked until now, if we want to extent the appeal a real rethink and transformation needs to be undertaken. I will add commentaries to each design in due course. Stand by!’ – by willwill100

Another great proposal is the Dust Theme:

And it still remains lightweight, the author says:

No custom software. It has to use an established GTK engine. This one is made with the Aurora GTK engine in mind, which sports a very polished look.

2. An unified Hardware Driver Database

Searching the forums and scavenging sourceforge for source code is not a great experience when you’re looking for a scanner driver.

We need a central repository or a download site that aggregates stuff like custom madwifi releases and kernel patches; stuff like the Atheros E5007EG in the Asus EEE, doesn’t work out of the box and a user should be able to take a trip to a central site that explains what he needs to do and provides the necessary files.

Webcams, card readers, USB gizmos – someone probably wrote a driver – the real challenge is finding them.

3. Out of the box end-user Goodness

Please, don’t make us sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras . We all want flash, java and mp3 playback, do we really have to ask for it? Pretty please?

Taking a look at gOS3 the other day, I thought Ubuntu should really consider at integrating useful consumer oriented applications: goodness out of the box. Stuff like Skype, Wine (the windows app emulator), and Picasa (Google’s photo management software) should be preinstalled. Why? Because they’re extremely useful and make a big difference to the end user; it’s just there.

While I may get some haters on my back for saying this, Picasa for Linux is a lot better than F-Spot and so is Google Desktop compared to Tracker.

I know, it’s a compromise, and I don’t like closed source either, but ultimately it’s about offering the best experience to the user, right?

And I don’t mean dropping off the ‘clean’ image – just create a spin-off that includes all this useful stuff.

4. Multi-monitor?

Don’t worry, that is how my setup looks in my dreams. I’m running on a 15 inch Acer with some pretty crappy specs. Photo courtesy of totalAldo.

How about decent multi-monitor support? The kind that’s easy to configure and actually works. Dragging an app on the second monitor and maximizing it shouldn’t be that hard to implement – and it’s a deal breaker for someone who needs to keep an eye on more than one thing at a time(like CNN and the stock monitoring software).

5. Power (non)management

How about some power management? Admittedly there’s been some progress in this area, but it’s still rather limited, and, since the world is rapidly moving to more mobility centered devices, it should be a big bullet point on that feature sheet.

6. A sound engine that works

Don’t ask how many hours I spent trying to get 5.1 sound of Ubuntu using the Realtek ALC883. ALSA, PulseAudio, name your sound server here, are all pretty crappy. Not to mention that it’s a royal pain when the whole system locks up with PulseAudio using 99% of the resources playing a MIDI file.

7. Reader’s choice

It’s your turn; what is bugging you in Ubuntu, what would you want to be changed? Tell us in the comments. Who knows, maybe some developers will see this article, your requests, and actually implement them.

Conclusion

I love Ubuntu, and that’s why I think it should and can be better. And I love that every one of us  can give a hand and shape the future of their operating system. That’s the genius of open source and Ubuntu, and that’s why it will ultimately wash the floor with everyone else.

Even as it is now, Ubuntu is the premier operating system, and trading security and reliability for a lousy sound engine is a no-brainer for me.