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Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release.

According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, the team will be “investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.”

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Novell this week announced the availability of Moonlight 2, essentially an open-source Linux version of Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. In addition, Microsoft and Novell said they plan on expanding their collaboration on Moonlight to include support for Moonlight implementations of Silverlight versions 3 and 4..

The companies say Moonlight 2 is interoperable with Microsoft Silverlight 2 and includes some features of Silverlight 3, including support for Bitmap APIs, file dialogs, easing functions, pluggable media pipeline, and custom codecs.

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Ubuntu Linux backer Canonical is changing top management in an effort to become more operationally disciplined, with founder Mark Shuttleworth passing the chief executive job to Chief Operations Officer Jane Silber by March 1.

Shuttleworth will continue working at the company, focusing on the company’s desktop Linux product, its cloud-computing efforts, and meetings with partners central to the company’s business. Silber, who has worked for the company for almost all its five-year history, will spend more of her time on Canonical’s enterprise products for business customers.

“Within the company I can say very strongly everyone’s expectations will be that Jane will bring a focus on financial performance as much as operational performance. It’s something I want for the company,” Shuttleworth said in a conference call with reporters Thursday.

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Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software especially under the GNU General Public License and other free software licenses. The primary form, Debian GNU/Linux, which uses the Linux kernel and GNU OS tools,  is a popular and influential Linux distribution.  It is distributed with access to repositories containing thousands of software packages ready for installation and use. Debian is known for strict adherence to the Unix and free software philosophies as well as using collaborative software development and testing processes. Debian can be used as a desktop as well as server operating system.

Organisation

The Debian Project is governed by the Debian Constitution and the Social Contract which set out the governance structure of the project as well as explicitly stating that the goal of the project is the development of a free operating system. Debian is developed by over one thousand volunteers from around the world and supported by donations through several non-profit organizations around the world. Most important of these is Software in the Public Interest, the owner of the Debian trademark and umbrella organization for various other community free software projects.

Thus, the Debian Project is an independent decentralized organization; it is not backed by a company like other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, and Mandriva. The cost of developing all the packages included in Debian 4.0 etch (283 million lines of code), using the COCOMO model, has been estimated to be close to US$13 billion. As of April 2, 2009, Ohloh estimates that the codebase of the Debian GNU/Linux project (45 million lines of code), using the COCOMO model, would cost about US$819 million to develop.

Features

Many distributions are based on Debian, including Ubuntu, MEPIS, Dreamlinux, Damn Small Linux, Xandros, Knoppix, BackTrack, Linspire, sidux, Kanotix, Parsix and LinEx, among others.

Debian is known for an abundance of options. The current stable release includes over twenty five thousand software packages for twelve  computer architectures. These architectures range from the Intel/AMD 32-bit/64-bit architectures commonly found in personal computers to the ARM architecture commonly found in embedded systems and the IBM eServer zSeries mainframes. Prominent features of Debian are the APT package management system, repositories with large numbers of packages, strict policies regarding packages, and the high quality of releases. These practices allow easy upgrades between releases as well as automated installation and removal of packages.

The Debian standard install makes use of the GNOME desktop environment. It includes popular programs such as OpenOffice.org, Iceweasel (a rebranding of Firefox), Evolution mail, CD/DVD writing programs, music and video players, image viewers and editors, and PDF viewers. There are pre-built CD images for KDE, Xfce and LXDE as well. The remaining discs, which span five DVDs or over thirty CDs, contain all packages currently available and are not necessary for a standard install. Another install method is via a net install CD which is much smaller than a normal install CD/DVD. It contains only the bare essentials needed to start the installer and downloads the packages selected during installation via APT.  These CD/DVD images can be freely obtained by web download, BitTorrent, jigdo or buying them from online retailers.

History

1993–1998

Debian was first announced on 16 August 1993 by Ian Murdock. Murdock initially called the system “the Debian Linux Release”. Prior to Debian’s release, the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) had been the first Linux distribution compiled from various software packages, and was a popular basis for other distributions in 1993-1994. The perceived poor maintenance and prevalence of bugs in SLS  motivated Murdock to launch a new distribution.

In 1993 Murdock also released the Debian Manifesto,  outlining his view for the new operating system. In it he called for the creation of a distribution to be maintained in an open manner, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. He formed the name “Debian” as a combination of the first name of his then girlfriend Debra Lynn and his own first name.

The Debian Project grew slowly at first and released the first 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995. The first ports to other, non-i386 architectures began in 1995, and the first 1.x version of Debian was released in 1996.

In 1996, Bruce Perens replaced Ian Murdock as the project leader. In the same year, fellow developer Ean Schuessler suggested that Debian should establish a social contract with its users. He distilled the resulting discussion on Debian mailing lists into the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, defining fundamental commitments for the development of the distribution. He also initiated the creation of the legal umbrella organization, Software in the Public Interest.

Perens left the project in 1998 before the release of the first glibc-based Debian, 2.0.

1999–2004

The Project elected new leaders and made two more 2.x releases, each including more ports and packages. The Advanced Packaging Tool was deployed during this time and the first port to a non-Linux kernel, Debian GNU/Hurd, was started. The first Linux distributions based on Debian, namely Libranet, Corel Linux and Stormix’s Storm Linux, were started in 1999. The 2.2 release in 2000 was dedicated to Joel Klecker, a developer who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

In late 2000, the project made major changes to archive and release management, reorganizing software archive processes with new “package pools” and creating a testing distribution as an ongoing, relatively stable staging area for the next release. In the same year, developers began holding an annual conference called DebConf with talks and workshops for developers and technical users.

In July 2002, the Project released version 3.0, codenamed woody, (after a character in the movie Toy Story, a trend which continues to the present), a stable release which would see relatively few updates until the following release.

The long release cycle employed by the Debian Project during this time drew considerable criticism from the free software community, and this triggered the creation of Ubuntu in 2004, to date one of the most influential Debian forks.

2005–present

The 3.1 sarge release was made in June 2005. There were many major changes in the sarge release, mostly due to the large time it took to freeze and release the distribution. Not only did this release update over 73% of the software shipped in the previous version, but it also included much more software than previous releases, almost doubling in size with 9,000 new packages. A new installer replaced the aging boot-floppies installer with a modular design. This allowed advanced installations (with RAID, XFS and LVM support) including hardware detection, making installations easier for novice users. The installation system also boasted full internationalization support as the software was translated into almost forty languages. An installation manual and comprehensive release notes were released in ten and fifteen different languages respectively. This release included the efforts of the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux, Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility sub-projects which boosted the number of educational packages and those with a medical affiliation as well as packages designed especially for people with disabilities.

In 2006, as a result of a much-publicized dispute, Mozilla software was rebranded in Debian, with Firefox becoming Iceweasel, Thunderbird becoming Icedove, along with other Mozilla programs. The Mozilla Corporation stated that Debian may not use the Firefox trademark if it distributes Firefox with modifications which have not been approved by the Mozilla Corporation. Two prominent reasons that Debian modifies the Firefox software are to change the artwork, and to provide security patches. Debian Free Software Guidelines consider Mozilla’s artwork non-free. Debian provides long term support for older versions of Firefox in the stable release, where Mozilla prefers that old versions are not supported. The software programs owned by the Mozilla Corporation were rebranded but the programs’ source codes remained the same only with minor differences.

Debian 4.0 (etch) was released April 8, 2007 for the same number of architectures as in sarge. It included the AMD64 port but dropped support for m68k. The m68k port was, however, still available in the unstable distribution. There were around 18,200 binary packages maintained by more than 1,030 Debian developers.

Debian 5.0 (lenny) was released February 14, 2009 after 22 months of development. It includes over 25,000 software packages. Support was added for Marvell’s Orion platform and for netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC. The release was dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, an active developer and member of the community who died in a car accident on December 26, 2008.

The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification is an open standard for unified operating system-centric device configuration and power management. ACPI, first released in December 1996, defines platform-independent interfaces for hardware discovery, configuration, power management and monitoring. The specification is central to Operating System-directed configuration and Power Management (OSPM); a term used to describe a system implementing ACPI, which therefore removes device management responsibilities from legacy firmware interfaces. The standard was originally developed by Intel, Microsoft, and Toshiba, and last published as “Revision 4.0″, on June 16, 2009. Current developers also include HP and Phoenix.

Overview

ACPI is an attempt to consolidate and improve upon existing power and configuration standards for hardware devices. It provides a transition from existing standards to entirely ACPI compliant hardware, with some ACPI operating systems already removing support for legacy hardware . With the intention of replacing Advanced Power Management (APM), the MultiProcessor Specification (MPS) and the Plug and Play (PnP) BIOS Specification, the standard brings Power Management into operating system control (OSPM), as opposed to the previous BIOS central system, which relied on platform specific firmware to decide power management and configuration policy.

The ACPI specification contains numerous related components, for hardware and software programming, as well as a unified standard for device power interaction and bus configuration. As a document that unifies many previous standards it covers many areas, for system and device builders as well as system programmers. Some software developers have trouble implementing ACPI and express concerns about the requirements that bytecode from an external source must be run by the system with full privileges. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, once described it as “a complete design disaster in every way”, in relation to his view that “modern PCs are horrible”.

Microsoft Windows 98 was the first operating system with full support for ACPI, with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Linux and PC versions of SunOS all having at least some support for ACPI.

OSPM Responsibilities

ACPI requires that once an OSPM-compatible operating system has activated ACPI on a computer, it then takes over and has exclusive control of all aspects of power management and device configuration responsibilities. The OSPM implementation must expose an ACPI-compatible environment to device drivers, which exposes certain system, device and processor states.

Power States

Global states

The ACPI specification defines the following seven states (so-called global states) which an ACPI-compliant computer system can be in:

• G0 (S0) Working
• G1 Sleeping subdivides into the four states S1 through S4.
  • S1: All processor caches are flushed, and the CPU(s) stop executing instructions. Power to the CPU(s) and RAM is maintained; devices that do not indicate they must remain on may be powered down.
  • S2: The CPU is powered off.
  • S3: Commonly referred to as Standby, Sleep, or Suspend to RAM. RAM is still powered.
  • S4: Hibernation or Suspend to disk. All content of main memory is saved to non-volatile memory such as a hard drive, and is powered down.
• G2 (S5) Soft Off– G2, S5, and Soft Off are synonyms. G2 is almost the same as G3 Mechanical Off, but some components remain powered so the computer can “wake” from input from the keyboard, clock, modem, LAN, or USB device.
• G3 Mechanical Off: The computer’s power consumption approaches close to zero, to the point that the power cord can be removed and the system is safe for disassembly (typically, only the real-time clock is running off its own small battery).

Furthermore, a state Legacy is defined as the state when an operating system runs which does not support ACPI. In this state, the hardware and power are not managed via ACPI, effectively disabling ACPI.

State	Description
S0/Working	System is on. The CPU is fully up and running; power conservation is on a per-device basis.
S1 Sleep	System appears off. The CPU is stopped; RAM is refreshed; the system is running in a low power mode.
S2 Sleep	System appears off. The CPU has no power; RAM is refreshed; the system is in a lower power mode than S1.
S3 Sleep (Standby)	System appears off. The CPU has no power; RAM is in slow refresh; the power supply is in a reduced power mode. This mode is also referred to as ‘Save To RAM’.
S4 Hibernate	System appears off. The hardware is completely off, but system memory has been saved as a temporary file onto the harddisk. This mode is also referred to as ‘Save To Disk’.
S5/Off	System is off. The hardware is completely off, the operating system has shut down; nothing has been saved. Requires a complete reboot to return to the Working state.
Source	http://www.lifsoft.com/power/faq.htm

System states

• S0 Working (G0), Processor in C0-C3, full context save RAM maintained
• S1 Sleeping with processor context maintained, RAM maintained
• S2 Sleeping with processor content not necessarily maintained, RAM maintained, most devices in D3
• S3 Sleeping, lower than S2, RAM maintained, most devices in D3
• S4 Sleeping, lower than S3, RAM not maintained, most devices in D3
• S5 Sleeping, lower than S4, no context saved, reboot necessary

Device states

The device states D0-D3 are device-dependent:

• D0 Fully-On is the operating state.
• D1 and D2 are intermediate power-states whose definition varies by device.
• D3 Off has the device powered off and unresponsive to its bus.

Processor states

The CPU power states C0-C3 are defined as follows:

• C0 is the operating state.
• C1 (often known as Halt) is a state where the processor is not executing instructions, but can return to an executing state essentially instantaneously. Some processors, such as the Pentium 4, also support an Enhanced C1 state (C1E) for lower power consumption.
• C2 (often known as Stop-Clock) is a state where the processor maintains all software-visible state, but may take longer to wake up.
• C3 (often known as Sleep) is a state where the processor does not need to keep its cache coherent, but maintains other state. Some processors have variations on the C3 state (Deep Sleep, Deeper Sleep, etc.) that differ in how long it takes to wake the processor.

Performance states

While a device or processor operates (D0 and C0, respectively), it can be in one of several power-performance states. These states are implementation-dependent, but P0 is always the highest-performance state, with P1 to Pn being successively lower-performance states, up to an implementation-specific limit of n no greater than 16.

P-states have become known as SpeedStep in Intel processors, PowerNow! or Cool’n'Quiet in AMD processors and PowerSaver in VIA processors.

• P0 max power and frequency
• P1 less than P0, voltage/frequency scaled
• Pn less than P(n-1), voltage/frequency scaled

Hardware Interface

ACPI compliant systems interact with hardware through either a “Function Fixed Hardware (FFH) Interface” or a platform-independent hardware programming model which relies on platform specific AML provided by the Original Equipment Manufacturer.

Function Fixed Hardware interfaces are platform specific features, provided by platform manufacturers for the purposes of performance and failure recovery. Standard Intel-based PCs have a fixed function interface defined by Intel, which provides a set of core functionality that reduces an ACPI-compliant system’s need for full driver stacks for providing basic functionality during boot time or in the case of major system failure.

For changing directory / to /etc

[root@pc1 /]# cd /etc

One step back /etc to /

[root@pc1 etc]# cd ..

Go to previous working directory

[root@pc1 /]# cd -

Go to current login user home directory

[root@pc1 etc]# cd ~

Show the contents of /etc in single color

[root@pc1 ~]#  dir  /etc

Show the contents of /etc in different colors with nature of contents

[root@pc1 ~]#  Ls  /etc

create a folder on root partition

[root@pc1  ~]#  mkdir  /disk

Create a folder in /disk

[root@pc1  ~]#  mkdir  /disk/dir

Create multiple folder in multiple directories with single command

[root@pc1  ~]#  mkdir  /etc/dir1 /var/dir2 /usr/dir3

Create multiple folder in same directory

[root@pc1  ~]#  mkdir  dir1 dir2 dir3

Copy a file in directory

[root@pc1  disk]#  cp  file dir

Copy a file from /disk/file and paste it in /disk/dir/

[root@pc1  disk]#  cp  /disk/file /disk/dir

Copy a directory with –r option

[root@pc1  disk]#  cp  -r  dir  dir2

Copy a file from /disk/file and paste it in /etc with myfile name

[root@pc1  disk]#  cp  /disk/file  /etc/myfile

Remove a file

[root@pc1  disk]#  rm file

Remove a file with forcefully option

[root@pc1  disk]#  rm –f  file

Remove a directory with out –r option and you face will an error

[root@pc1  disk]#  rm dir

Remove a directory with –r option

[root@pc1  disk]#  rm  -r  /disk

Remove a directory with forcefully option

[root@pc1  disk]#  rm  -rf  dir

Move /etc/dir1 to /disk/ with different name

[root@pc1  disk]#  mv  /etc/dir1  /disk/mydir

/bin          All commands which are used by normal users

/etc          System conf files

/var          Server data logs Mail proxy cache

/dev         All devices name stored in /dev

/sbin        All commands which are used by supper user

/boot        Linux kernel ( vmlinuz , initrd ) Grub directory

/usr          All gui tools installed in /usr

/proc       System information’s ( picture of RAM )

/home     User’s home dir’s

/tmp        Temporary files

/media      Auto mounted devices mount point in /media

• Overview of the  Linux file system
• Linux Basic Commands

Systems like Debian are composed of free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is available gratis (free of charge) in most cases.

In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human-readable form of the program (the source code) must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. Such a notice either is a “free software license”, or a notice that the source code is released into the public domain.

The free software movement was conceived in 1983 by Richard Stallman to satisfy the need for and to give the benefit of “software freedom” to computer users. The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 to provide the organizational structure which Stallman correctly foresaw would be necessary to advance his Free Software ideas.

From 1998 onward, alternative terms for free software came into use. The most common are “software libre”, “free and open source software” (”FOSS”) and “free, libre and open source software” (”FLOSS”). The “Software Freedom Law Center” was founded in 2005 to protect and advance FLOSS.  The antonym of free software is “proprietary software” or “non-free software”. Commercial software may be either free software or proprietary software, contrary to a popular misconception that “commercial software” is a synonym for “proprietary software”. (An example of commercial free software is Red Hat Linux.)

Free software, which may or may not be distributed free of charge, is distinct from “freeware” which, by definition, does not require payment for use. The authors or copyright holders of freeware may retain all rights to the software; it is not necessarily permissible to reverse engineer, modify, or redistribute freeware.

Since free software may be freely redistributed it is generally available at little or no cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as applications, support, training, customization, integration, or certification. At the same time, some business models which work with proprietary software are not compatible with free software, such as those that depend on a user paying for a license in order to lawfully use a software product.