The coolest thing that you can do with Linux is run it in Virtualbox and then ssh into the virtualization session and run commands. That is a very cool aspect of virtualization, the ability to give a VM an IP address and access it remotely or at your desktop. If you are on a LAN, then you could easily access the VM remotely with SSH. I have used Hyper V as well on Windows Server 2012 and that is a good solution for server virtualization. The Linux alternative, XEN is another solution for using virtualization to run many operating systems one one powerful server. That enables cost savings when you do not need to purchase as much hardware but the systems administrator has the ability to run the servers that they need without needing more rack servers for each machine. That is the future of computing. Everything is moving to the cloud. And this requires a massive computing infrastructure, supporting all of the gamers and E-mail users that rely upon cloud computing to get their critical messages. More and more games are using the cloud to create communities around the gameplay. The Windows 10 operating system is set to be a cloud based OS, and Ubuntu is using cloud features. The Ubuntu One cloud system allows the users to have their files automatically uploaded to the cloud, keeping them safe. As I mentioned Ubuntu, there is a small change in the 13.10 distribution.
The Unity search will no longer send user data to Amazon. That is very good news. The privacy concerns prevented some from using the Ubuntu distribution. Although you could just use Xubuntu instead. That is always a good solution. The search in Unity is rather good, better than the search in Windows 8.1, which is really slow and useless now. They killed the comparatively useful search function in Windows 7 and 8 and installed a Bing web search instead. Why not focus in searching the actual computer instead of the Internet? I just searched for “Task Manager” on a Windows 8.1 machine with 6 gigabytes of RAM and it took 30 seconds for the search results to come up, and 3 minutes for the other search results. This is insane. The old Beagle search tool for Linux when used to search your PC would bring up results instantly. That was on a Pentium II 350 MMX with 192 megabytes of RAM running SUSE Linux 10. How times have changed. We need to make computers fast again and improve the quality of the desktop search function. For Linux there is also the locate command. This allows a Linux user to search their system for files. Below is an example.
12:56:56 homer@neo ~/Documents $ locate vmlinuz /boot/.vmlinuz-3.9.5-301.fc19.x86_64.hmac /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-d622a566f4ac4b49b1cb43d7e2a94323 /boot/vmlinuz-3.9.5-301.fc19.x86_64 |
This is another example using wildcards. This is to search all of the /bin and /usr/bin folders for a file named xterm.
13:16:22 homer@neo ~/Documents $ locate **bin*xterm /usr/bin/koi8rxterm /usr/bin/uxterm /usr/bin/xterm |
Another example; looking for files named “ls”.
13:21:03 homer@neo ~/Documents $ locate **bin*ls /usr/bin/fedorautils /usr/bin/gnomevfs-ls /usr/bin/gvfs-ls /usr/bin/h5ls /usr/bin/hp-levels /usr/bin/ls /usr/bin/mtools /usr/bin/ntfsls /usr/bin/rpmls /usr/bin/smbcacls /usr/bin/systemd-cgls /usr/bin/zipdetails /usr/sbin/fcrls |
The find command is also useful for finding files on your system.
13:26:03 homer@neo ~/Documents $ find /boot -name init* /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-d622a566f4ac4b49b1cb43d7e2a94323.img /boot/initrd-plymouth.img /boot/initramfs-3.9.5-301.fc19.x86_64.img |
This shows that there are very useful file searching utilities on Linux; and it is better than Windows 8.1 by a long shot.