mail2and
Walking, since 2004.
Thisz my article for ngage mag of the TOI group.. so pls don't mind the simple lang used....
So you’ve just installed a new distro of linux and are confused with some terminal commands? You don’t know how to install applications? You can’t access your windows partitions? You can unzip or untar your compressed files? Don’t worry! We are here to help you…
ACCESSING YOUR WINDOWS PARTITIONS ON LINUX
A very nice feature on linux distros is the support for windows partitions. This helps you to save or open you existing files without having to boot into windows. But, linux names the partitions as hda1, hdb3, hda5 etc. Normally your C: is hda1, your D: is hda5, your E: is hda6 and so on. In most modern distros, the partitions are mounted automatically. But in some Red Hat based distros like Fedora Core, you need to mount the partitions manually…
First create a folder in /mnt say ‘Cdrive’. Suppose you have a Fat 32 partition and you want to mount C:. Then the command you need to type in terminal(linux equivalent of Dos-prompt) is:
mount –t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/Cdrive
UNDERSTANDING FILE TYPES
This is another very important aspect of linux. Different distros have support for different file types. Red hat based distros support .rpm files while debian based distros support the .deb extension. All the distros support tarballs(.tar and .tar.gz file types).
INSTALLING APPLICATIONS
Installing an application can be a tricky job in linux. While .deb and .rpm files can be installed automatically, the tarballs have to be manually compiled and installed.
Suppose you have a .tar file say ‘nvidia.tar’
First create a folder in /home say ‘folder’ and move the file to the folder
Now, un-tar the file in the folder using the command ‘tar –xvzf nvidia.tar’
After un-compressing its time to compile and install the file:
1. Type ./configure and press enter
2. If its successful, type make all
3. Then install it using the command make install
Now you can access your program from ‘/usr/local/bin’ or refer to the README file to know where it is installed.
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