Layman Linux

Everytime you share your flash drive or portable hard disk with your Windows friends don’t you get a dozen of viruses & other malwares in return? Due to your friends folly of not keeping their antivirus softwares up-to-date you have to pay in the form of an infected windows environment. To counter this, I have developed almost a full proof solution. Now I no longer need to be paranoid when plugging shared pendrives or external hard disks.

When you receive the flash drive or portable hard disk from your friend, don’t plug it directly into Windows. If you have any Linux distro installed boot into it. If you don’t have one, then boot from a Live CD. Any distro will do as long as it boots into a live environment or at a shell. Once you boot into the distro, mount & open the pendrive or portable hard disk. Now list all files of the pendrive in a shell or in a graphical file manager like Nautilus.

You should now notice some files & folders with weird names. These are the viruses. Now simply delete them all. Also delete the ‘autorun.inf’ which when infected instructs the viruses to load as soon as the pendrive is plugged in. With such approach, I’m sure you won’t even need to scan the pendrive into your Windows environment with an antivirus(though I do not recommend doing so). Offcourse viruses embedded into compressed files(zip,rar etc) won’t go away & still can infect your windows environment. Same holds true for macro viruses hidden inside a word document. The logic behind this is very simple that Windows viruses can’t execute themselves under Linux. The above procedure will come to rescue when you don’t have an antivirus installed & should be used only as a precautionary measure. You should still install & keep an updated antivirus software if you use Microsoft Windows.

Most of the modern Linux distros can easily detect & mount external drives automatically. In extremely rare case they may fail to mount. At such times, knowing how to manually mount the external drives will come handy. This simple guide will show you to mount external drives like pendrive, external hard-disks, card reader etc in Linux.

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Earlier on we had walked through managing software packages under Debian Linux. In this post we look at managing software under an RPM based Linux distro. RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager. As the name suggest this format was developed by Redhat but now it is not confined to Redhat Linux. Now many Linux distros like OpenSUSE, Mandriva etc have incorporated the RPM format. There are many graphical utilities out there which can help you manage software on your RPM distro but as always command line will offer you total control & flexibility over the process. Let’s go ahead & learn how to manage software on an RPM linux distro. Below foobar refers to an example application. Replace it by the name of your software package.

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Installing software under Linux doesn’t require one to hit the console anymore. Thanks to the graphical package managers available which have made the job of installing, uninstalling & updating software packages a child’s play. Still knowing how to manage software via console is necessary to make yourself a competent Linux user. In this first post I will cover installing software under Debian Linux. I will follow this post with installing softwares on Redhat, installing from source etc.

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After having travelled through the virus infested land of Windows, new Linux converts often have queries about viruses on their Linux systems. Here I will demystify all those queries related to Viruses, Antivirus software’s etc once & for all.

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