Sunday, April 30, 2017

Clonezilla - copying all your files and programs.


Students, teachers, parents and all users experience problems with pcs, tablets, mobile phones etc…..The problem one has when all data is lost, is that how can one remember all the files and programs one uses for his studies/work? It needs endless time to install everything again. Who can give you back all the lessons notes one has on his/her pc/tablet?
Clonezilla creates a copy of the contents of a computer’s hard drive on another storage device and enables users to do backup and recovery on their personal computers. Clonezilla has two types:
  • Clonezilla Live: This unicasting version is adequate for doing a backup and restore on a single computer.
  • Clonezilla SE: This multicasting version is Clonezilla's server edition, and is suitable for doing a backup and restore for many computers simultaneously. It can clone more than 40 computers at the same time.
Some of Clonezilla’s features include
  • It is available free of charge
  • It supports many file systems, allowing it to clone GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems
  • Clonezilla SE supports multicast, which can be used for cloning many computers at once. It can also be used remotely to save or restore a number of computers.
If you need more information regarding installation or how to use Clonezilla, just follow the links. You tube videos are found here. If you perfer the wikihow series, it's here.


Monday, April 17, 2017

GIT

Teachers and students would need to publish or put online various projects in IT department. Other schools would need to download the original version in order to use or to experiment with. A very good solution would be GIT.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

This version control system has become incredibly popular thanks in part to the growing use of the GitHub service. Companies and projects that use it include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Perl, PostgreSQL, Android, Rails, QT, Gnome and Eclipse. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.



Sunday, April 2, 2017

Virtual Box


Who Needs a Virtual Machine (Virtual Box) ?

When one tries various distros (operating systems like windows, mac or Linux), one may become attached with a particular program which is hard to copy in other distros. Instead of going through the complexity and pain of dual booting, you can easily use virtual machine to run practically any software.

Looking at the vulnerabilities found in Microsoft Windows, I would be extremely careful with it running on my main system. I am much more comfortable keeping Windows in a contained virtual environment. That way, even if it is compromised, it will not damage my entire system or data and will only affect the limited set of files it was accessing. 
 
VMs also can be useful for those non-Linux users who want to play with Linux or who want to migrate to it but don't want to jump shark by formatting the OS they were used to and switching to Linux. Virtual machines get these users comfortable with Linux, so they can make the switch with confidence when they are ready. And, you can be running Linux “inside” your shiny Mac OS X or Windows 10.

The best thing about virtual machines is that I can run multiple Linux distributions on the same hardware, without having to reboot to switch between distros. It’s extremely important for me to run various distros and keep an eye on them. And it’s even more important to be well versed with all major distros instead of being “vendor-locked” or totally dependent on any one. Using VMs, I can also run different desktop environments on the same system without having to log out to change the environment.

If you are aspiring to become a system admin or developer, you certainly don’t want to know only one distro; you must be an expert in any operating system; you never know which OS your employer or client would be using. You can’t say “sorry, I know only XXXX.” If you are a developer, you need different distributions to test your applications.

You can clearly see that there are many advantages of using virtual machines. The biggest advantages of using virtualization instead of multi-booting is efficiency. One wastes way too much time in formatting hard drives and switching between distros. With virtual machines, you can start a new virtual machine for a distro without affecting your work; it’s as easy as opening a new application.

It’s “virtually” impossible for many people to have six physical machines, which waste financial resources and electricity and take up space. Instead of buying six physical machines, one would rather invest in more RAM and a multicore processor that can handle more virtual machines. One can run almost a dozen distros (including Windows) on the same machine; and there is no downtime!!!

The reason we go for VirtualBox is that it’s extremely easy to use. It has tons of features and functionalities that can be easily accessed without any hard-core technical knowledge. The biggest advantage is its cross-platform support -- you can install Virtual Box on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Obviously we go for the open source and free one.

Where to download;

Tutorials: video; written;