Carlos Moises Pelaez | IT250 | Linux Operating System: Assignment 1.1 | 3/30/2013 |

1) In the free software world, there are several uses of the word "free." The two main ones are "free as in speech" and "free as in beer." Free as in speech means you are relatively unfettered in what you can do with the software. You can modify it, use it for whatever you want, and give it to others (or even sell it). Free as in beer means that you can obtain it for no monetary cost. Richard Stallman originally envisioned GNU to be free as in speech. At the time he started the project (in 1983), internet access was slow and expensive, high-capacity storage devices weren't readily available, and very few people had a personal computer. It would have been infeasible to offer GNU on a gratis basis. Stallman actually used to charge $150 for a tape with the GNU software on it, plus $15 for a manual. 2) The GNU project develops programs and utilities for an as yet rudimentary operating system known as "GNU." Since the programs are open-source, they have been adapted to work using the Linux kernel as well. Other than using its programs, there is no direct relationship. 3) Advantage #1 – Stability: If you have used other operating systems, once you have made the switch to Linux, you will notice that Linux has an edge over Windows here. I can remember rebooting Windows many times over the years, because an application crashed, and I could not continue working. Linux can crash also, but it is much harder to do. If an application crashes in Linux, it will usually not harm the kernel or other processes.
Advantage #2 - Free Software: Most software can be obtained without cost for Linux. For example, one thing that has kept people from Linux is the lack of office software. That has changed with Open Office, and now you can edit documents and presentations from the popular Microsoft software. The conversion is not 100% perfect, but it has worked remarkably well in allowing me to correspond and use documents that people send me via e-mail or the web.
Advantage #3 - Runs on old hardware: If you have an old 386 or 486 laying around collecting dust, you can use this to run Linux. I remember running Linux just fine on a Pentium 100 with a 1 GB disk drive, and 16 MB of memory. One use of an old machine like that could be a file server. Just go to your computer store, buy a large hard disk (as long as your old stuff can support it), and you can make a great storage server. With all the digital pictures and movies around today, this could be a great use for Linux. Look into using Samba, a server application for Linux that allows you to make your machine share the disk as a Windows share.
Advantage #4 – Security: Linux has the advantage of the code being in the public domain. This can be a double-edged sword; while you can look at the code, and developers can fix holes rapidly, it also means hackers can find bad code. I have been very impressed with the security of Linux, and the programs that run on it. I think having the code out in the open, and the ability to fix things yourself if necessary is a big plus. Who likes to work blind? With some distributions, on installation the computer will ask you what levels of security you would like for your system. You can be very trusting, or you can be paranoid. Linux gives you this flexibility. 4) There is no recent information regarding the different hardware platforms onto which Linux has been ported. 5) For text mode: 200 Mhz Pentium, 128 MiB of RAM, and 90 MB hard drive space. For graphics: 400 Mhz Pentium II, 192 MB of RAM (recommended 256), and hard drive space varies by packages - about 3 GB minimum. 6) ext4 7) LVM is a Logical Volume Manager for the Linux operating system. The main advantage is what its name suggests. Logical Volume Management. It allows you to manage logical volumes in a single partition, but more importantly, it allows you to shrink or expand them while the system is up and running. With traditional partitions you had to estimate how much space you needed for partitions (good luck guessing!) and if you got it wrong or didn't like it, you would have to backup everything, wipe the hard drive, reformat/partition it, load everything back on, and then hope you get it right this time. After a few of those rounds, you just kinda thought "Heck with it, Good enough!"
LVM is leaps and bounds better! 8) A mount point is a directory used to access a resource, such as an NFS share or block device. For instance, if I have a USB Flash drive, I can mount it and specify a mount point of /mnt/myflashdrive. 9) Four primary partitions. Due to limitations imposed by DOS back in the '80s, ATA (the proper name for ide) and SATA drives can only hold four partitions. To work around this, extended partitions were invented. Extended partitions can hold four more partitions, any of which can be more extended partitions. Thus the number of partitions is effectively limited by the size of the disk. These limitations aren't imposed by the disk itself, rather the PC architecture. Intel macs, which don't need to maintain compatibility with DOS or old versions of windows use EFI, which allows for 128 primary partitions. The SCSI has nothing to do with disk partition. You can have unlimited partitions. 10) Root, home, boot and swap. /usr, /home, /var 11) It uses the swap. The swap is a dedicated partition and not a file.

Reference
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