Category: General

What Exactly Is A Linux Distro?

You’ll hear the phrase “Linux distro” tossed around quite a lot and this article will explain what exactly is a Linux distro. It’s not overly complicated and this article shouldn’t take a whole lot of time.

You should also be aware that I’m writing this article in a way that is aimed at the lowest common denominator. I’ll be trying hard to make it simple to read and easy to understand. I don’t want to overwhelm folks with details. I want folks to understand the general concepts.

On to the article…

What Is Linux:

The term ‘Linux Distro’ is short for ‘Linux distribution’. 

I don’t suppose that’s all that helpful…

So, what is Linux? We use the term loosely, but Linux is just the kernel. That’s all Linux is – by itself.

Again, that’s probably not all that helpful.

Then, well, what is a kernel? The kernel is an interface between hardware and software. It also schedules tasks, such allocating memory and keeping track of the memory space where things are stored. It manages processes, memory, and device drivers – interfacing hardware with software.

You really shouldn’t need to interact with the kernel at a personal level, at least not directly. At the same time, everything you do requires kernel participation. Without it, hardware would be useless.

Okay, so now we know what the kernel is – and we know that it is called Linux. Well, that’s all Linux is – and, by itself, the kernel is not all that useful.

Introducing GNU:

Instead, we have some tools around the kernel that make the kernel useful. These tools are often from GNU. Many of these tools existed before the kernel was invented, actually. They’re (many of them) clean-room implementations of Unix tools that were just waiting for the right kernel to come along.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds released his kernel to the world at large. The GNU tools already existed. People put the two together and we started to have the basics of a working operating system.

See, an operating system is much more than just the kernel. At bare minimum, it must have some tools to interact with the kernel. The GNU tools will let you do that *(and more). As GNU tools predated the kernel and because the kernel is newer, many advocate calling it “GNU/Linux”.

That is not an argument without merit as all the major Linux distros make use of tools from the GNU Project. Without one, the other is useless. While there was an expected GNU kernel (for GNU Hurd), that has not had much attention and success.

And Now, A Linux Distro:

You could actually accomplish quite a bit with just GNU/Linux but it still didn’t have tools like a useful browser, a graphical text editor, a graphical desktop, or anything like that. By itself, it’d have limited appeal and you’d need to write any software you needed that wasn’t already included. A lot of what people expect would not have been included with just the GNU tools.

And so the concept of a ‘distro’ is born. 

Enterprising people, people who’d join others with their efforts, would combine GNU/Linux with a bunch of other tools – creating a concept of  a set of tools fit for a purpose. You’d have distros meant to be used for running servers, distros for home use, distros for security purposes, distros for privacy reasons, etc… 

And those distros would all be built around the GNU/Linux tools.

Each Linux distro out there was made for a reason. If there were already distros that filled that roll, then the distro author’s reasons were that they could do it better or in a different way. 

Today, there are like 500 active Linux distributions out there. Each one of them fills a niche, scratches an itch, performs a task (or set of tasks), at least a little bit different from the others. So, finding a Linux distro that suits your needs can be either easy or hard. It all depends on what you need.

Why Call It Linux:

Well, we call it Linux because that’s the most important bit. Without it, none of the rest of the system works. Without the Linux kernel, you’re stuck looking for a different kernel. (Note: Other kernels do exist.)

There’s absolutely some merit in calling it GNU/Linux. The GNU tools are in most every distro and without the GNU tools the kernel is pretty useless. At the same time, the GNU tools are older than the kernel. Combined, the provide a great deal of the functionality that is an operating system.

I don’t call it GNU/Linux because it’s unwieldy and everyone who needs to know that GNU is involved already knows that GNU is in there. I find those that insist on it are mostly okay people, they’re just pedantic and want to highlight the distinction. They’re not bad people, they just want to make sure GNU is recognized. 

When important, I’ve been known to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux. I just don’t make a habit of it. Also, really, not too many people care. Though, I suppose calling it GNU/Linux can be confusing for some new folks. Not my readers though, they’re witty, intelligent, and eager to learn!

Closure:

Well, it’s an article… This one tells you about the Linux distro. It explains what a Linux distro is and why we call it that. Hopefully this is enough information for a layperson. If not, you can always ask for more information and I’ll do what I can to oblige. Like I said, this is written for the lowest common denominator. It’s not written for the folks who have used Linux for a decade. Those people have been using Linux for a decade, they should darned well know what the Linux kernel is!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

How To: Change Ubuntu Into Lubuntu

Today’s article is going to teach you how to change Ubuntu into Lubuntu. Why? Because you can! Because you might want to try a different desktop environment, or because you’d like to have them both on one computer. It’s remarkably easy to change Ubuntu into Lubuntu – and, of course, would work with other official Ubuntu flavors with just slight modifications

As you know, Ubuntu is a distro. Lubuntu is also Ubuntu, but it is an official flavor of Ubuntu. They are not actually different distros. Lubuntu is Ubuntu, with different Ubuntu software installed to provide a different experience.

Ubuntu is Canonical’s flagship operating system. It ships with a suite of useful software and uses the GNOME desktop environment. If you say Ubuntu, that’s the distro you’re talking about. Lubuntu is a separate project under the same umbrella, based on Ubuntu. Lubuntu, once known for being lightweight, is now using the LXQt desktop environment where it once used LXDE. The latter dropped for the former for a whole host of reasons, including maintenance improvements. Comparatively speaking, it’s still fairly lightweight.

Full Disclosure: I’m an “Official Lubuntu Member” and, by extension, also an Official Ubuntu Member. I’m quite biased with regards to Lubuntu, but my biases are open and I still strive to be objective (or at least not objectionable!).

So, if you have Ubuntu installed and you’d like to experience Lubuntu, then this is the article for you, as it will teach you how to …

Change Ubuntu Into Lubuntu:

Like oh so many articles, if you want to change Ubuntu into Lubuntu, you’re going to want to start off with an open terminal. You can use your menu to open a terminal, or you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you have your terminal open, you need to enter just one command, really. The command you’ll enter is:

That will run its course and then pause on a screen where you can read about your display manager. There are no real options on that page, so you can just press the enter button after reading it.

This won’t actually take all that long. When you’re done, you can logout and then login to Lubuntu or, more effectively, just reboot and you’ll boot into the Lubuntu environment. 

When you reach your new login menu, you can pick which desktop session you want to login with by using the dropdown menu in the upper left, with Lubuntu being the new default. Of course, you can login to the regular Ubuntu session still (as well as Ubuntu on Wayland). Most things will still work in when you’re logged into an Ubuntu session, except for blanking the screen. That fails because you’re no longer using GNOME-display-manager (GDM3). (You’re now using SDDM.)

That was it. That’s all you have to do. However, if you don’t like it and want to change it back, it’s slightly more complicated – but not terribly so – to reverse this change. To reverse it, you need to …

Change Lubuntu Into Ubuntu:

Once again, open your terminal. It’s not hard, as described in the 2nd section of this article. Heck, it’s described in almost every article.

You can start with just this command:

And that’ll get you almost all the way back to normal. You’ll still have the splash screen and boot logos that belong to Lubuntu. You could leave those and learn to accept them, or you can fully restore the original setup.

Assuming you want things back the way they were, we need to get your display manager reconfigured – restored to what it was. That’s a very easy command. It looks like:

You’ll get another one of those warning screens and, once again, there are no options. The only thing you can do is press the enter button. Fortunately, that’s exactly the button you want to press!

Finally, you need to change the boot screens. It’s a pretty easy command, but it is interactive. Just run this to get it started:

That will ask you which theme you want to use. In this case, you’ll pick 1 and press the enter key. Basically, you want the option that isn’t “Lubuntu” and this will fix the final visual issue.

When you next reboot, you’ll have the default Ubuntu logo and theme during the whole boot process (assuming everything went as expected). Your login theme will have been restored to Ubuntu’s default, as will have the Ubuntu splash screen while the system boots.

Of course, you could always opt to keep Lubuntu installed alongside Ubuntu, that is LXQt alongside Gnome, if you’d prefer. Then again, if you like your Lubuntu installation, maybe you’ll just want to use it. It’s easy enough to remove GNOME or to even just clean install Lubuntu.

Closure:

And there it is! It’s an article that teaches you how to change Ubuntu into Lubuntu. It’s not a very complicated affair and you can restore it easily enough, should you not like it. You can more or less do this with any other official flavor. Swapping back to just the old Ubuntu will potentially use different commands, but it’ll otherwise be quite similar.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

So, What Is ‘sudo’ Anyhow?

If you’re a new user, you’ll see commands with sudo in them and you’ve gleaned the meaning of what is sudo. The sudo command is a bit more robust than you may know and this article is going to tell you what sudo is. As I’m not actually sure how to format such an article, I’m going to try to smash it to fit my usual style article. This may make for  a fairly short article.

The sudo command stands for ‘superuser do’ and that’s probably how most folks will know it. That is, after all, correct. You use sudo when you want to execute something that requires different privileges than your account has. Most of the time, that means you want to run the command as an administrator with root privileges. 

But, that’s not all that sudo can do. You can also use it to run software as though you were another user on the same machine. Some folks (erroneously, but not without merit) have taken to referring to sudo as ‘substitute user do’. It suits, but it’s not correct.

To be fair, sudo didn’t have those extra features when it was new (~1980). When it was new, it just let you run commands as a superuser – root – and that was it. Perhaps if it had been named today, with the current feature set, those folks would be correct by calling it ‘substitute user do’. As it stands, those people are technically incorrect.

I’ve also written a couple of other sudo-related articles that may interest the reader.

Create A New User With SUDO Privileges In Ubuntu
How To: Use sudo Without A Password

What Is sudo:

The sudo command typically starts a command, such as an installation command. For example, a command like this:

If you try that command without a privileged account, it’ll fail and you won’t be able to install the software. For security sake, your regular user account should operate under the ‘least privilege principle’, meaning your regular account can’t be used to maliciously operate the system.

The sudo command is that safety gap. To use sudo, you must be a member of the sudoers group/have rights to the command and you must know the password. If you have sudo access, you can cause all the harm you want to a system! So, protect those passwords because they are legitimately the keys to the kingdom.

As we learn what is sudo, we might as well learn a few flags that you can use with it. The most important one, as sudo is plenty powerful by itself, is the -u flag. You use that not when you want to operate as root but when you want to use the privileges of another user on the same system. It looks like this:

When you’ve authenticated as sudo, you will not need to enter your password again for some period of time. The most common period of time is 5 minutes. After five minutes of non-use (idle time with no sudo commands) have passed, you will need to authenticate all over again.

If you want to exit early, you just use the -k flag. That resets everything and you’ll need to authenticate the next time you wish to use sudo. Conversely, if you use the -v flag, it will grant you another five minutes of authenticated time, allowing you to extend your sudo session.

There are a few other flags, but those aren’t really used often. Though, if you’re going to enter a lot of commands, you can use sudo -s and open a new shell where you have sudo privileges. That’s useful if you’re going to use a number of commands and don’t want them in your terminal scroll-back.

Closure:

There you have it, you can now answer the question: what is sudo? It’s a handy tool to have and there are uses most people probably never bothered learning. It’s there if you need it and you might as well be familiar with it.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Enable PPAs In Elementary OS

Today’s article will tell you how to enable PPAs in Elementary OS. This is generally considered a bad idea, but it’s your computer and you can do anything you want with it. So, well, this one will have you enabling PPAs in Elementary OS.

I suppose that some folks will have no idea what I’m talking about. So, I’ll point out that Elementary OS is a Linux distro. Also known as eOS, it seems  targeted at looking good, having cohesive apps, and charging you money for this. That’s fine. You can use it for free.

Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. Ubuntu has PPAs, a way to install software that’s not in the default repositories, but Debian does not. Some Ubuntu derivatives also do not allow PPAs (by default) and Elementary OS is among those that do not.

Elementary OS developers would prefer you use AppImages or Flatpaks, instead of accepting the security burden that is allowing PPAs. After all, any PPA you add is pretty much like giving someone root access to your computer.

Well, today’s article is about just that. It’s a quick article that’ll teach you how to use PPAs in Elementary OS. Heck, the command to enable this is shorter than this intro, where I show you how to…

Enable PPAs In Elementary OS:

To get started, we’re going to have to have one of those open terminals. You can root through your menu (or use the search feature) or you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Next, to enable PPAs in Elementary OS, you really only need one command. But, we’ll make sure you’re updated fully before trying this. Thus, you get two commends!

Now that you’ve done that, you can now add PPAs to eOS. If you wanted to keep up with the more recent versions of LibreOffice, you’d run the following commands:

That should install LibreOffice and then keep it updated as the PPA maintainers update the repository. Either way, congratulations! If you’ve done everything correctly, you can now enable PPAs in Elementary OS.

Closure:

There you have it, another article. This article tells you how to enable PPAs in Elementary OS. Their preferences for different packages isn’t too dissimilar than Ubuntu themselves recommending Snap applications. Plus, any PPA you add will the be able to install software by its very nature, Maybe it is time to start doing away with the old ways and moving towards modernity?

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

How To: List Cron Jobs

Today’s article is going to show you a few ways to list cron jobs on your computer. If you don’t know, cron is a way to schedule jobs in Linux. Cron goes all the way back to the mid-70s UNIX era. It’s a pretty handy tool that we’ve not yet really covered on Linux Tips.

In one of these future articles, I’ll have to explain how to add, remove, and change cron jobs. It’s easier than you might think. Importantly, even if you haven’t added any cron jobs, your system almost certainly has many of them. They’re useful for scheduling tasks and your computer does all sorts of task scheduling even if you don’t add anything to it.

In today’s article, we’ll show you how to list cron jobs by their type. By type, I mean by when they’re scheduled. Tasks are scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can schedule them at other intervals, but generally speaking the system will only use those particular intervals.

List Cron Jobs:

Like many articles, this one will also require an open terminal. The terminal is a pretty useful tool! Anyhow, you can open one pretty easily. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once  your terminal is open, we can first examine the the hourly cron jobs. It’s really easy. Just enter:

You may start to notice a trend with this next one. If you want to list cron jobs by their daily status, your command would be just a little different.

Sure enough, if you want to list cron jobs by their weekly status, the command isn’t much different. That one is:

And of course monthly is like this:

See? Nice and easy. A little bite-size article that tells you how to list cron jobs.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have yet another article, this one dealing with showing you the cron jobs that you have running on your computer. These are all the tasks that are regularly scheduled. One of these days, I’ll do an article about editing them and adding them, including adding them with different interval schedules.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Linux Tips
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.