As I’ve explained some terminology you have to get used to before using a linux OS, in the first part, it’s time now to get a quick look at the list of commons linux – related tools, utilities and UI features. Even in a real-world situation you might not deal with them, I thought is good to mention them since those tools helped linux become famous.

The X Window System

As it’s name says it’s a window system helping developers to build user interfaces – windows. The main task it does is to provide a set of standards and protocols to interact with the physical devices, leaving the drawing tasks (look-and feel) in the developers hands. The first version of the system was written by MIT, back in 1984. The latest version is X11 and is here since 1987. Some of the most used graphical interfaces for linux, GNOME and KDE are based on X. Find more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System .

RPM (Resource Package Manager)

Maybe the best package manager, rpm has been originaly developed for Red Had Linux. It is used to manage (install/uninstall/search/update) software packages on linux distributons. It also provides an API to let software developers to write UI interfaces in various languages and environements.  Find more: official site is http://www.rpm.org/ and the wikipedia  page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager .
A similar software is dpkg developed by the Debian Linux team, and it’s replacement,  apt (Advanced Packaging Tool) .

GNOME

If you ever saw a linux OS, I’m sure you heard it. Gnome is a desktop environement and ui interface for linux. It’s job is to provide an graphical desktop environement  users.  I know those words are hard to remember, but just to show you the differece:

Linux whithout a desktop environement:

 Linux with desktop environement and graphical UI:

Now which one do you think looks more cute?  The one with Gnome on it course. And Gnome itn’t the only one, there’s also KDE, LXDE, XFCE, EDE, or Mezzo.

Window Manager

A window manager is an component or an extension of the desktop environement. It provides the users with the ability to customize the look and feel of the windows. In this list i’ll mention: Compiz, Metacity, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, IceWM,  Blackbox, Xmonad, Window Maker, Sawfish, Pekwm, StumpWM .

Compiz Fusion

As I staded before, Compiz is a window manager. The “Fusion” comes from Beryl, another window manager, now merged with the Compiz project. This is a very popular one, because it enables 3d, wobble, bubbles, fire and a lot of other effects for desktop. Just watch it in action:

GIMP

Gnu Image Manipulation Program is a free, open source image manipulation software, very popular among linux users. It supports layers, effects, alpha channel,  text layers, animations, quick mask, paths, transofmable paths and selections MING support,  and much more using plugins. Find out more on the official page www.gimp.org .  Similar software packages are: Inkscape, Krita, Kolourpaint .

XMMS

It’s name comes from X Multimedia System, and it’s an audio player for linux systems. Nowadays it’s not very popular, beacause there are better alternatives, but it was heavily used before. Find more on the official website www.xmms.org . And the plethora of alternatives are: Audacious,  Amarok, RhythmBox, Exaile, Banshee , Noatun and many more.

MPlayer

One of the oldest and the best video players for linux, MPlayer has been around since 2000. It also has been ported for Windows and Mac OS. It features a good post-processing, and lots of formats supported by default. There are a lot of GUIs for it so, I’m not gonna list them here, only a few alternatives like: VLC, Banshee, Kaffeine, Miro, Xine .

OpenOffice

Not so much linux-related, but still widely used by linux users, OpenOffice is a free office suite, and one of the best competitors for MS Office. Free office suites for linux, are also: KOffice and Scribus .

Some popular games on linux

Course there are some great ones like: Americas Army,  Cube 2 (Sauerbraten), Pingus, Neverball,  Enemy Territory, Nexuiz . And some of these games are also available on Windows or MacOS, so you can start a LAN Party anytime – no matter what OS your foriends choose.

Also “awareded” 

Other noticeable software for linux are: Konqueror – a file manager for KDE, K3B – CD/DVD burning, Cinelerra – non-linear video editing and compositing,  Wine – Windows emulation on Linux, ALSA – sound driver architecture, PulseAudio – sound server, CloneZilla – drive imaging, Audacity – audio editor, Grip – CD ripper, Cenon – vector drawing,  Ktoon – 2D animation, Ark – archiving (zip, rar etc.), Blender – 2D, 3D animation, AvideMUX – video editor, GParted – partition manager and so many more.

So now let’s stop and make a consclusion:

As you probably noticed most Linux operating systems  are just as smart as any other commercial OS. You can do just about anything with it using only free software: watch videos, listen to music, edit documents, play games, draw, reder 3d scenes, make videos etc.

And unlike other commercial operating systems which offer an all-in-one OS with proprietary UI, file manager, web browser etc. from a single vendor; A linux OS offers different copmonents, mostly free, from different vendors. That means that you can make your OS look and feel as you need!

If you are using the internet, I am sure you heared about Linux. So you might know that it was “invented” by Linus Torvalds in 1991. I prefer to say invented, because the idea was his first, even if some of my friends would say he copied the kernel and made some changes to it. But that’s far beyond the purpose of this article, if you are interested you can find more on Wikipedia – History of Linux .

The Penguin

If you are searching the “linux” word on Google, you’ll notice a lot of penguins everywhere, that’s beacause as you might guess the penguin is the Linux mascot, named Tux. Avoid saying  it “logo”, because nowadays  every distribution has it’s own logo, or, should we say, it’s own brand. But Tux is commonly accepted as mascot since is still associated with the Linux kernel project.

It’s a weird story about how it was adopted, but it’s cute isn’t it?

The Freedom

It’s pretty hard to imagine then, in 1991, when everybody was seeing the OS and computers market as a tremendous business opportunity, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), IBM, Apple, Compaq, Dell and so on, somebody was thinking completely different. So our guy, Torvalds, thought the software should be something “open”.  Let me explain you this… as me personally took some years to understand :
So one day you want to rearrange some furniture items in your home.  You start moving things, the you realize somewhere is a pipe left out. Course you’ll want probably to cover it with something, or moving it to another part of the house, where it won’t bother you more. Thinking of this you remember your neighbour is a plumber and could help you fix it in minutes. That’s more better then calling to the nearest company offering this service plus it’s free, and you always enjoy having a drink with your neighbour.
Seems this a real scenario? Now imagine this scenario applied to your computer. You buy a brand new one, with a proprietary OS already installed. It works prefect for the first few months but then you realise some day, something might be done to make it work faster for you, or just misses one feature you need. But even if your neighbour or you would know how to make it better to fit your needs, you can’t because it’s proprietary, and in it states in it’s license, you are not allowed to modify and/or alter the code.
That way was thinking Linus back in 1991. Quite interesting isn’t? So Linux has been licensed under the GNU General Public License, as a free open-source software.

The Kernel

The kernel is the core component of the majority of operating systems. It makes the link between the hardware components and software proceses as well as offering an abstraction layer for hardware. It also facilitates the communications between different proceses and controls the data flow and timing actions.
It’s a bit difficult to understand, I know but you don’t have to understand that, unless you are involved in an OS kernel project. But you’ll have to keep in mind that that actually what Linux is, and what the Linux Kernel Project is aimed to. Linux was not thought as a full-featured operating system, but a kernel that would allow software engineers to build on it their own operating systems – called distributions.
The Linux Kernel Project is solving some of the painful and repetitive problems for software developers. Issues like hardware drivers, video 2d and 3d acceleration, hardware clock and so on. Plus it’s free and open-source.

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well. If you get the torrent version, you’ll see it’s in a .BZ2 format. You’ll need to extract it. Macs and Linux should be able to do this automatically, but for Windows you may need a tool like Win Rar.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine :

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit Next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit Next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on thepiratebay.

The torrents are also available here: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5353501/Google_Chrome_OS_0.4.22.8_-_Virtual_box_image
and http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5173881/Google_Chrome_OS_0.4.22.8_VMWare .

Enjoy!