Unix Trix

Zone-H has published its statistics from 2005-2007 on hacks by OS, and more. Topping the list was Linux, with two Windows variants below.

Not a bad list of “10 Linux Commands You’ve Never Used“. Obviously most of these are application to any nix variant, so are worth checking out.

My personal favourite tool –

 ldd, want to know which Linux thread library java is linked to?

# ldd /usr/java/jre1.5.0_11/bin/java
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x00bd4000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00b87000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x00a5a000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00a3c000)

Lifehacker has the link to an Ubuntu Tutorial on Installing Plugins for Gnome-Do the launcher. If you don’t know, Gnome-Do is a powerful application launcher, much like some of the apps available for Windows.

 … extend Gnome-Do’s powers to music management, Gmail, system functions, and other tasks, Ubuntu Tutorials has put together a simple guide to installing plug-ins for the launcher, a trick that’s not readily apparent for first-time users …

Want to learn or play around with Linux but don’t want to mess up your PC? A live CD is a bootable CD which will (in this case) let you run Ubuntu Linux (the current popular flavour) without installing anything! It all runs off the cd, so its perfect for the first time user — get more details here.

There was a time when few knew about Tux the Linux mascot, but nowadays people are dressing there babies to match (see picture below).

If you’re interested in the history of the pengiun that could, check out sjbaker.org’s wiki entry on its history. One of the most interesting posts, is the origin of the name –

Re: Let's name the penguin! (was: Re: Linux 2.0 really _is_ released..)
.
James Hughes (jamesh@interpath.com)
Mon, 10 Jun 1996 20:25:52 -0400
.
(T)orvolds (U)ni(X) --> TUX!

Who knew!

Whether you are interested in specific apps, or you want a chance to learn but need to keep running Windows or whatever the reason, andLinux is an interesting project.

As you can see above, andLinux runs natively under Windows, allowing you to execute Linux applications (like XFCE) on your Windows machine.

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista; 32-bit versions only). This project was started for Dynamism for the GP2X community, but its userbase far exceeds its original design. andLinux is free and will remain so, but donations are greatly needed.

andLinux uses coLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. coLinux is a port of the Linux kernel to Windows. Although this technology is a bit like running Linux in a virtual machine, coLinux differs itself by being more of a merger of Windows and the Linux kernel and not an emulated PC, making it more efficient. Xming is used as X server and PulseAudio as sound server.

Read more and try it out at the project site www.andLinux.org.