#linux how to

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Installing drivers on Linux Ubuntu Cinnamon Mint (2024)

Download your .deb file

Right click your .deb file and click “extract here” or “extract…” and select a location

Open your terminal and type: “ sudo apt-get install “ Do NOT press enter

Drag your .deb file to your terminal, it should paste the location of the file (typically /home/(documents/download)/YourName)

Press enter, if prompted enter password

Restart device

Done!!

I couldn’t find any tutorials with up to date commands, so here’s what I did to install my driver!

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The Linux Distribution for Windows XP and 7 Fans is here! Meet ZorinOS!

Windows XP and Windows 7 are gone…at least as far as Microsoft is concerned. For many, many users across the globe, however, those platforms still live on. Both businesses and homes still use both desktop operating systems that have seen their End Of Life. These platforms are no longer supported by Microsoft, which means they are no longer getting security updates. What does that mean to end users? It means their computers and data are at risk.

Fear not, there is a solution—thanks to Linux.

Zorin OS has been around for a while. In fact, it’s only recently released its 11th iteration. Not surprisingly, the latest release looks and feels very similar to the previous release. The previous release also looks very similar to its predecessor (and so on, and so on). But, Zorin offers a bit more than just a single platform to make Windows XP/7 users feel at home. You’ll find both Zorin OS 11 (the cutting-edge release) and Zorin OS 9 (the stable release). That’s not all. If you select either Zorin OS 9 or 11 (from the Zorin OS download page), you’ll find four different flavors for each:

Core (Free): The essential Zorin OS (everything you need for a typical Zorin OS desktop)

Lite (Free): A lightweight version of Zorin OS (to run on older hardware)

Business (€8.99): Core plus everything you need to run a business (Accounting, bookkeeping, retail, and more)

Ultimate (€9.99): Core plus everything you need for business, multimedia, gaming, etc.

All flavors, except Lite, are available in both 32- and 64-bit editions.

How Close Is Zorin OS to Windows XP or 7?

This is looming question. Before I get into the minutiae of the Zorin OS desktop, it cannot be left unsaid that this is not a Windows platform. To many, that’s not a bad thing. However, to those who depend upon Windows to get their daily work done, this could be a hurdle. Fortunately, Zorin saw fit to include Wine, which allows end users to install many of their favorite Microsoft software. This means you can download those .exe files, right-click them from within the file manager, and select Run with Wine (Figure 1 above) to install the Windows software. Once installed, you can run the software as expected.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect to have to use Windows software when on Linux…and Zorin OS makes sure you have everything you need to get your work done. You’ll find Firefox (web), LibreOffice (office suite), Geary (email), Gimp (graphics), Rhythmbox (music), and much more. You can also easily install tens of thousands of software titles from what is clearly the Ubuntu Software Center (hopefully, Zorin will migrate from USC to GNOME Software).

If you work with either Windows XP or 7 on a network that often requires you to share folders with others, you’ll find that process incredibly similar. To share out a folder on your Zorin OS desktop, follow these steps:

Open up the File Manager

Right-click the folder to be shared

Select Local Network Share

In the resulting window (Figure 2), check the box for Share the folder

Give the share a name, add a comment (if needed), and check the box(es) required for necessary permissions

Click Create Share

If you’ve altered the permissions (by checking either permission box), you will then be prompted to click Add the permissions automatically. Click that and the share will be added. That share should now be available on your network.

NOTE: You might see an error when sharing a folder. This is most likely due to the fact that Samba isn’t running. Samba is the service used to share out folders on a network. If you see that error, here’s what you need to do to resolve that issue:

Click on the Zorin Start button

Type start

Click Startup Applications when it appears

In the resulting window, click Add

Enter the details as shown in Figure 3

Click Save

Reboot

Now Samba will always run at startup, and you didn’t even have to get your fingers dirty with the command line.

AWN

At the heart of Zorin OS’s ability to closely resemble Windows XP and 7 is Avant Window Navigator. This is a particular dock, placed on the desktop, that serves to act as the Windows Start button, Taskbar, and System Tray.

AWN is an outstanding choice for this task. Not only is it very stable, it’s also quite flexible. You can add/remove applets, change the theme, add application launchers, and so much more. In fact, the AWN dock offers significantly more configuration options than does either the Windows XP or 7 panel. But if you really only want Zorin OS to look and feel like XP/7, here’s what you need to know.

To add an application launcher to the panel, you first must add it to the desktop. To do this, follow these steps:

Find the application launcher in the Start menu

Right-click the launcher

Select Create Desktop Shortcut

Go to the desktop

Click and drag the shortcut to the panel

You’ll need to drag the shortcut to the currently existing launchers on the panel (otherwise, it can’t be added to the panel). When you see a small + sign on the launcher (Figure 4), you can release it and it will be added to the panel.

NOTE: You can remove the shortcuts from the desktop, once you’ve added the launcher to the panel.

To configure AWN, right click the panel and select Preferences. In the Preferences window (Figure 5), you can configure AWN to better fit your needs/taste.

If you don’t find a theme you like in the included selection, you can always find plenty more (e.g., these on Deviant Art). To install a new theme, follow these steps:

Download the theme to the ~/Downloads directory

Open the File Manager and change to the Downloads directory

Right-click the downloaded theme and select Extract Here

Open up the AWN Preferences

Go to the Themes tab

Click Install

Navigate to the newly extracted theme (will end in the .tgz extension) and select it

Click Open

In the theme window, select the newly installed them

Click Apply

Play around with the AWN configurations to get it to perfectly match your needs. The Zorin Tools

Click on the Star button and type zorin. Click on Zorin Look Changer and you can easily switch between Windows XP, Windows 7, and GNOME 2 (Figure 6). This tool does an amazing job of picking up some of the subtleties between Windows 7 and XP.

When you typed zorin in the Start menu, you should have also noticed the Zorin Web Browser Manager. This tool allows you to easily install from the Firefox (default), Chrome, Web, and Midori browsers. Click on the browser you want to install from the selection (Figure 7), click Yes when prompted, and the browser will be installed.

How Close Can You Get?

You’ll be surprised at how closely you can get Zorin OS to look and feel like either Windows XP or 7. Out of the box, the experience is incredibly close to Windows XP. With just a little tweaking, you can be sure that Zorin OS will behave exactly how you need it. Will it serve as a perfect drop-in replacement for Windows? That all depends on what you need to get your work done.

Wine does an outstanding job of running a great many Windows applications, but you may find some applications will not run or do not work exactly as expected. To find out which apps will run on Wine, check out the Wine Application Database. If the software you need will run with Wine, Zorin OS will get you as close to Windows XP/7 as possible (and give you the added stability and reliability of the Linux platform. Now that is a serious win-win.

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Learning Linux File Permissions

One of the most basic tasks in Linux is setting file permissions. Understanding how this is done should be considered a must-know, first step in your travels through the Linux ecosystem. As you might expect, such a fundamental issue within the operating environment hasn’t changed much over the years. In fact, the Linux file permission system is taken directly from the UNIX file permission (and even uses many of the same tools).

But, don’t think for a second that understanding file permissions is something you’ll wind up having to spend days and days studying…it’s actually quite simple. Let’s walk through what you need to know and how to put it all together.

The Bits and Pieces

The first thing you need to understand is what file permissions apply to. Effectively what you do is apply a permission to a group. When you break it down, the concept really is that simple. But what are the permissions and what are the groups?

There are three types of permissions you can apply:

read — gives the group permission to read the file (indicated with r)

write — gives the group permission to edit the file (indicated with w)

execute — gives the group permission to execute (run) the file (indicated with x)

To better explain how this is applied to a group, you could, for example, give a group permission to read and write to a file, but not execute the file. Or, you could give a group permission to read and execute a file, but not write to a file. You can even give a group full permission to read, write, and execute a file or strip a group of any access to a file by removing all permissions.

Now, what are the groups? There are four:

user — the actual owner of the file

group — users in the file’s group

others — other users not in the file’s group

all — all users

For the most part, you will only really ever bother with the first three groups. The all group is really only used as a shortcut (I’ll explain later).

So far so simple, right? Let’s layer on a bit of complexity.

If you open up a terminal window and issue the command ls -l, you will see a line-by-line listing of all files and folders within the current working directory (Figure 1 above).

If you look in the far left column, you’ll notice listings like -rw-rw-r–.

That listing should actually be looked at like so:

rw- rw- r--

As you can see, the listing is broken into three sections:

rw-

rw-

r–

The order is quite important…for both permissions and for groups. The order is always:

User Group Others — for groups

Read Write Execute — for permissions

In our permissions listing example above, the User has read/write permission, the Group has read/write permission, and Others has only read permission. Had any of those groups been given executable permissions, it would have been represented with an x.

Numerical Equivalent

Let’s make this even more complex. Each permission can also be represented by a number. The numbers are:

Read — 4

Write — 2

Execute — 1

The numerical substitution isn’t an apples to apples change. You can’t drop in:

-42-42-4--

Instead, what you do is add up the numbers you want for each group. Let’s stick with our example above (-rw-rw-r—). To give the User group read and write permission, you would add up 4+2 to get 6. For the Group, you need the same permissions, so they get the same number. You only want Others to have read permissions, so they get 4. The numerical equivalent is now:

664

So, if you want to give a file 664 permissions, you’d issue the chmod command like this:

chmod 664 FILENAME

where FILENAME is the name of the file.

Changing Permissions

Now that you understand the actual permissions of files, it’s time to learn how to change those permissions. This is done with the chmod command. One of the first things you must understand is that, to be able to change the permissions of a file, either you must be the owner of the file or you must have permission to edit the file (or have admin access by way of su or sudo). Because of that, you cannot just jump around in the directory structure and change permissions of files at will.

Let’s stick with our example (-rw-rw-r–). Suppose this file (we’ll name it script.sh) is actually a shell script and needs to be executed…but you only want to give yourself permission to execute that script. At this point, you should be thinking, “Ah, then I need the permission listing to read -rwx-rw-r–!”. To get that x bit in there, you’d run the chmod command like so:

chmod u+x script.sh

At this point, the listing will be -rwx-rw-r–.

If you wanted to give both User and Group executable permission, the command would look like:

chmod ug+x script.sh

See how this works? Let’s make it interesting. Say, for whatever reason, you accidentally give all groups executable permissions for that file (so the listing looks like -rwx-rwx-r-x). If you want to strip Others of executable permissions, issue the command:

chmod o-x script.sh

What if you want to completely remove executable permission from the file? You can do that two ways:

chmod ugo-x script.sh

or

chmod a-x script.sh

That’s where all comes into play. This is used to make the process a bit more efficient. I prefer to avoid using a as it could lead to issues (such as, when you accidentally issue the command chmod a-rwx script.sh).

Directory Permissions

You can also execute the chmod command on a directory. When you create a new directory as a user, it is typically created with the following permissions:

drwxrwxr-x

NOTE: The leading d indicates it is a directory.

As you can see, both User and Group have executable permission for the folder. This does not mean that any files created in the folder will have the same permissions (files will be created with the default system permissions of -rw-rw-r–). But, suppose you do create files in this new directory, and you want to strip Group of write permissions. You don’t have to change into the directory and then issue the chmod command on all the files. You can add the R option (which means recursive) to the chmod command and change the permission on both the folder and all the containing files.

Now, suppose our example is a folder named TEST and within it is a number of scripts — all of which (including the TEST folder) have permissions -rwxrwxr-x. If you want to strip Group of write permissions, you could issue the command:

chmod -R g-w TEST

If you now issue the command ls -l, you will see the TEST folder now has a permission listing of drwxr-xr-x. Group has been stripped of its write permissions (as will all the files within).

Permission to Conclude

At this point, you should now have a solid understand of the basic Linux file permissions. There are more advanced issues that you can now easily study, such as setuid and setgid and ACLs. Without a good foundation of the basics, however, you’d quickly get lost with those next-level topics.

Linux file permissions haven’t changed much, since the early days. And, they most likely won’t change much going into the future.