So Linux is the Kernel, the core of the Operating System. A distribution includes Linux and applications. Investigating this topic for the LPI Linux Essentials certification, we look at some major open source applications available in Linux. These include those targeted for desktops, servers and mobile devices. Yes, your mobile phone and tablet can well be based on Linux if they are android based.
Firstly we can list some Server applications or services:
- Apache – web server
- Squid – Web proxy
- SSH Secure Shell remote access server
- DNS – Name resolution
- DHCP – IP Address allocation
- NTP – Time Server
- openLDAP – Directory Services
- SAMBA – File and Print Server
- Gimp – Graphics
- Openoffice / LibreOffice – Office Apps
- Firefox – Browser
- Thunderbird – Email
In general, software for Linux distributions is made available through online Software Repositories. As well as introducing some of these applications, we can additionally view how we manage applications using these repositories or repos.These repos can differ with each distribution but the main tools that we have to manage the software are:
- CentOS / Red Hat / Fedora : yum
- SUSE / openSUSE : zypper
- Debian / Ubuntu : apt
Making use of these repositories, software can easily be located and installed onto the desktop or server. We will see more of this in the video. The tools may be GUI based, especially on the Desktop or command line or CLI based. Useful, of course for servers.
The first video looks at software in General in Linux and the second video look at Libre Office.
In compiling these tutorials I have to make reference to the LPI objectives. Having added those objectives to a LibreOffice document it is easy to create a table of contents with clickable hyperlinks. The next video shows how this is done and the value in Open Source software, especially when it is available on Linux, Mac and Windows OSs: