Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 Released (Update: ISOs Now Available)

The Debian Project has released the seventh update of Debian 8 Jessie. This release ships with tons of security updates, bug fixes, and updated packages. The existing users of Debian 8 need to point the apt package tool to one of the updated Debian mirrors and get the update. The new installation media and ISO images are yet to be published.

Update: Debian 8.7’s ISO images are now available for download. It can be grabbed via these mirrors or download the installation images from here.

Back in early 2015, Debian 8.0 Jessie was released after spending two years in development. This release switched back to GNOME as the default desktop environment choice. Now, the Debian Project is here with the latest update to this long-standing Linux distribution.

The seventh update of Debian 8, i.e. Debian GNU/Linux 8.7, has just been released. As expected, this release fixes tons of existing security issues. Notably, many of the included security advisories were already published and referenced.

Long time Linux users must be knowing that security is one of the primary concern of the Debian Project. The project handles all security-related issues brought to their attention and ensures their fixes in a reasonable time limit.

The release notes for Debian 8.7 include many bug fixes and security updates, which you can find here. The release has 80+ bugfixes and 80+ security patches.

One should also note that Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 isn’t a new version of Debian. Instead, it includes security updates and updated packages. So, if you’re already running Debian 8 Jessie, you don’t need to perform a fresh install. Just update via an updated Debian mirror to get all the new packages.

At the moment, new installation media and CD/DVD images are yet to be published. We’ll be updating the article when the ISO images will be available.

Did you find the Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 release exciting? Don’t forget to share your feedback.

Linux Founder Linus Torvalds: “I Don’t Really Love Other People. I Love Computers”

Do you know that the development of Linux was never started with the intention of making it an open source kernel? At the recent TED conference in Vancouver, Linus Torvalds revealed more interesting facts about his life and working style.

Linux kernel is the world’s biggest open source collaborative project. This would automatically trick your brain into thinking that the person behind the kernel would be someone who loves working with fellow programmers.

Well, proving you wrong, Linux founder, Linus Torvalds, admitted that he originally didn’t intend to make Linux open-source and began working on it as a solitary project. This happened at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver.

“It wasn’t open source,” he said. “It was source that was open. There was no intention.”

“I’m actually not a people person. I don’t really love other people. I love computers,” the legendary software engineer Linus Torvalds said in an interview with Chris Anderson at the TED conference.

He accepted the fact that with time he has learned that having different people on a project is very important.

However, it shouldn’t be much shocking as Linus is known for his outspoken behaviour and occasional rants. In the interview, he was very open and revealed that he loves to work at home in an office.

“It is the most boring office you’ll ever see,” he said. “I often work in my bathrobe, and I have to have complete silence.”

When asked about his future plans or projects, he said he doesn’t have one. He said, “I don’t have an agenda” and he’s still happy working on Linux.

“I am not a visionary. I’m an engineer. I’m happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.”

Another fact we came to know at the talk: Linus Torvalds considers Thomas Alva Edison greater than Nikola Tesla. Sorry, Larry Page and Elon Musk!

10 Reasons : Why should we use Linux? | Padsa Information

Bored using windows or any other server in your computing experience? Linux has been designed to offer you smooth and effective experience. Whether you want to use it for business or any other home operations, Linux offers the most reliable system to adopt. Linux has become one of the most adopted systems by many users in and around the world. Most of the world’s largest data centers across the globe use Linux. There are various reasons that answer why should we use Linux, keep on reading.

Why Should we use Linux?

1. Linux is free of charge and in case you still doubt, then know that it is.

In case you want to get rid of all the restrictions in terms of patents of any other form of restriction, then this would be the best switch for you. Linux can be edited in terms of the source code by most of the innovative business owners. It is, therefore, the best system to be adopted by a large number of business owners who want to simplify their business operations.

2. Linux is more secure than any other server

Linux is a dependable server that offers excellent security to the user. Linux community offers the security fixes for any technical or security threat that encounters. Moreover, Linux users also offer regular kernel updates and regular security patches. In this regard, it is not mandatory for you to have an anti-virus program for your system. With Linux, you can save a lot of dollars you could have spent buying an antivirus program.

3. It has a wide compatibility to several hardware

Most of the other servers do constraint you with a lot of features. Take for instance windows 7 and 8 do require at least 1GB RAM for your system to operate well. However, Linux is such a lightweight operating system and hence does not constrain you in terms of a memory capacity of your system. It can thus be used by any of your systems. It is designed for everyone and can be used by anyone.

4. Easy to Operate

Ideally, one does not have to go for intensive training for them to know how to operate Linux operating system. Besides, it comes with all the necessary functionality that is included in windows OS. If you are looking for a system that is reliable and can be used by anyone in your business, then this could be the best system to adopt.

5. It comes inclusive of drivers

Ever experienced some difficulties when using windows only to be told that some of the drivers are missing in your system? Linux saves you a time you have to spend moving from one shop to another for drivers. It saves you money as well. Most of the drivers are included in Linux operating system. No need to hassle and stress for drivers.

6. Smooth and easy Updating Process

Updating windows can be very challenging and stressful. Linux updates both the OS and the applications that are installed in your system. Besides, when compared to windows that need your system to shut down Linux updates are just a matter of click.

7. Linux is speedy

Since Linux is lightweight, it is therefore far much speedy compared to any other operating system. Windows has a bloated software and therefore huge to operate. In any business operation or gaming experience, time is the most crucial factor. Linux is the best system to adopt as windows get slower days after days.

8. Linux has a community support

One of the best things about Linux is the fact that you have a sense of belonging. You have a platform where you can share everything with fellow users. You get to know more through the frequently asked questions. Moreover, any question that you have can be dropped and get the answers that you need.

9. Linux features a powerful word processing program

Libre Office is a powerful word processing program that comes with Linux. You can use it for free in editing, opening and send Microsoft documents. You, therefore, save more and more dollars you could spend buying such a program.

10. Linux offers you a chance to download a lot of free tools

By just a click of a button, you can get access to thousands of tools and programs. This is a big added advantage over the windows operating system. It is the best way to transform your serving experience.

Don't forget to comment below if you have any question .

How to Clear Your Terminal History on Linux or macOS

Press the “up” arrow in the Mac or Linux command line and you’ll see the last command you ran. Keep pressing “up” and you’ll see more commands; you can go back days, months, or even years.

This is called your history, and it’s very convenient. If you made a mistake typing a long command, simply press “up” and fix the problem. If you want to re-connect to an SSH server you used the other day, simply press “up” until you see the relevant command.

It’s useful, but there’s also a potential security problem here, particularly if you accidentally typed a password in plain text at some point. How does one clear this history? Long story short, you can do so with two commands: history -c, followed by rm ~/.bash_history. Here’s what those commands do, for greater clarity.

Clear the Current Session’s History

Your history can be broke down into two chunks. There’s your current sessions’ history, and there’s your long-term history. Our first command, history -c, deals with the current session.

The history command is built into Bash itself, and the -c modifier tells the program to clear that history. This command will prevent anything in your current session from being written to your long-term history, but does not clear out that long-term history.

Clear All of Your Bash History

If you want to remove the entirety of your history, run the following command:

rm ~/.bash_history

If you don’t know, rm is a longstanding command for deleting files in UNIX-based systems. ~/.bash_history is a simple text document, which stores you Bash history.

Alternatively, you could open the file and delete any lines you’re concerned about. On a Mac, type open ~/.bash_history and your default text editor will open the file.

On Linux systems, replace open with the name of your preferred text editor, such as nano, vim, or gedit. One you’ve opened the file, you can delete any lines you’d rather not keep by hand. Save the file, then restart your shell, and the lines you’ve deleted will stop showing up.

Clear Your Terminal for a Like-New Session

This one is mostly unrelated, but I’m mentioning it anyway. The command clear makes your Terminal look like you just opened a new session, which is useful if you take a lot of screenshots and want things to look tidy (or don’t want people over your shoulder to see what commands you’ve been running.)

This is entirely aesthetic: scroll up and you’ll still see your previous output. But if you’re in my line of work, it comes in handy.

What are the some of the best programming tips and tricks | Padsa Information

• Readability is the path to more interesting projects within a career.
• Readability is the path to knowing what you wrote 5 years ago, and makes code reuse actually viable
• Readability is the path to acquiring protégées that can learn from your style.
• Readability that is understandable by others allows people to appreciate your code at a level of architecture, not just functional.
• Readability is the path of lease resistance when you have a bug in your code.
• Readability is the how you put ideas into understandable text and syntax, much like writing a paragraph in natural language.
• Readability is somehow not a priority for most other developers, however it’s probably pretty important to your development director, if you work for one.
• Readability is more important than most believe. With moore’s law, it’s even more important to focus on readability than pre-mature optimization.

Here’s more:

• Most schools and colleges teach computer science like trade school skills. How to fix a car. How to be a dental assistant. How to be an admin.
• Most schools and colleges don’t realize there’s a difference between Computer Science and Programming. These are different.
• Most of the people applying for job in California are Programmers, when the job actually requires a Computer Scientist.
• Most people only know one or three programming languages. I personally believe you need to know between 7–8 of them to really master the idea of programming.

Psychology wise?

• Most programmers are very insecure about their programming skills and end up in bandwagon debates over which programming language is better.
• Following that, most don’t realize that each programming language is just a tool that’s better at something while other is better at something else… Like speaking Spanish while in Spain, or knowing Chinese in the middle of China down. Right tools for the job.
• Most programmers are habituated to just google everything, that’s how they were taught.
• Most insecure programmers rave about how “compact” their code is. Which serves very little purpose on compiled languages.
• Most insecure programmers focus on hyper tuning a few lines of code. Good programmers focus on delivering functional and useable software.

Habits….

• Most programmers follow the syntax and structure of the style they were taught. Very few question the style they were taught. Examples are {’s on the if-statement line, or on the next line vertically aligned with the }.
• Most programmers don’t make diagrams before they begin experimenting. Many just copy some existing example and start their modifications from there (which runs the risk of adopting bugs from existing examples).
• Most programmers don’t unit test. They believe they are better than that, or they are lazy.
• Most programmers read xkcd.
• Programmers that are computer scientists are better at computational problems.

What most don’t realize about computer science (as opposed to only programming.)

• You can merge sort your socks.
• You can apply scalability methods of algorithms to work labor level processes to improve business efficiency.
• You can learn other fields and industries because CS is a catalyze for industries like physics, chemistry, rendering, etc…
• You can apply CS methods to accounting, management, logistics, market trends, human resource management, workflow processing engineering, etc…
• Computer science has philosophies within it that can change your mode of thinking.

Lots and lots. It’s amazing what you can do if you pay attention to the computer science bit, rather than only how to program software.

Computer science includes:

• Hardware
• Software
• Programming
• Algorithms
• Problem solving
• Efficiency measurement methods
• Stability methods
• Integration concepts
• Computer architecture

And most importantly….

• Computer Science History

You learn to appreciate these things when you take in CS and listen in beyond only the programming trade skill.

Either you are a viable employee… Or you’re an amazing one that could hold a position of technical leadership.

Take your time to comment on this article.

What Is The Difference Between Sudo And Su In Linux? | Padsa information

Many of you might be using sudo and su in terminal every day to accomplish different tasks. While sudo runs a single command with root privileges, su launches another shell instance with the privileges of the intended user. Both, sudo and su, are use to grant root privileges to the users in different manners.

ALinux user comes across sudo and su in terminal very often. If you are a new Linux user, you might be fascinated by the things you can do with sudo and su. Last week, I also told you about a Windows command that you can use to get sudo-like functionality. Sudo and su  provide root privileges in two different ways. But, how are they different? Here, I’ll try to answer this query.

Before telling you the difference, let me tell you the meaning of a root user. The root user in a Linux system has the maximum permissions and he/she can do anything to the systems. Apart from letting a normal user install/delete some package, root user permissions also act as an extra security layer.

Important: One should also note that these functions are used in a different way in different Linux-based operating systems. Most of the things we’ll discuss here are applicable to Ubuntu and its derivatives. They might differ a little bit in other Linux distributions.

Key differences between sudo and su

The su command stands for super user or root user. It executes on a Linux system with no additional options. The user just needs to add root account password. In the terminal, su also lets you access any other user account using the required password. That’s why su also stands for substitute user or switch user. Simply type su followed by the user account name, e.g., sudo fossbytes, and you’ll enter the password for fossbytes. After completing the job, you can exit the root shell by typing exit. Overall, su basically starts another shell instance with the privileges of the intended user.

On the other hand, sudo runs a single command with root permissions. When a user runs a command with sudo, e.g., sudo command, he/she needs to enter the current user account password to run it as root user. Sudo uses a config file (/etc/sudoers) to define the rights of different users. For detailed information on sudo, you can read our detailed article written by Devin — Sudo in Linux

Comparing the both, sudo lets one use the user account password to run system command. On the other hand, su forces one to share the root passwords to other users. Also, sudo doesn’t activate the root shell and runs a single command.

Using sudo and su in Linux distros

Ubuntu was the first widely used Linux distribution that adopted sudo-only approach by default. When one installs Ubuntu Linux, the root account is created without any password. One needs to assign a password to the root account to log in as root. In Ubuntu and many other Debian-based distros, the user needs to remember just a single password. This way, Ubuntu encourages a user to avoid logging in as a root user. In distros like Fedora, a person needs to create different passwords for root and user accounts.

There’s an often-used combination sudo su that Linux users find helpful. First, sudo asks for your password, and, if it’s provided, it runs the next command as a root user. Also, to run a single command as a root user using su, one needs to use this syntax: su -c ‘command’.

Did you find this article helpful? Don’t forget to drop your feedback in the comments section below.

Why The First Windows Drive Letter Is Always C? Why Doesn’t It Start With A Or B? | Padsa Information

The various logical drives in Windows are assigned a drive letter. Generally, the drive letter for the first logical drive is C followed by D, E, F. Well, A and B are also alphabets. These drive letters are kept in reserve for some special purpose. Here is the reason.

In the case of Windows and many other operating systems, a physical hard drive–used to install OS files and store data–is divided into partitions. In Windows, these partitions can be formatted using file systems like NTFS, FAT32, etc. These partitions are then known as logical drives and they are assigned a drive letter.

As far as my tech knowledge is concerned, it started to sprout in the mid-2000s. My first computer came with Windows and, obviously, or as some sort of a tradition, the first drive letter was C. In the beginning, I was told not to put any stuff in the C drive. Later, when a repair guy fixed my desktop, he installed Windows to the D drive. It seemed a bit unusual and it was a dilemma for me, whether I should keep my data on the C drive or not.

Even though I was a little bit uncomfortable with the changed drive letter, I actually never thought why the first drive letter was C, why not an A or a B, or a Z. It was years later, in fact, recently, when I asked the question to Google–Why is C the first Windows drive?

It was not the case that the people who assigned the drive letters didn’t know that A and B also existed as an alphabet. It was done to prefer an old technology with is nowhere to be seen now, the floppy disk.

The drive letters are assigned according to a preference scheme for different kinds of media attached to the computer. These letter date back to the time when IBM ruled the PC market. Then, PCs didn’t have a hard drive, sounds strange? But you might be aware of the fact that the floppy drives were used as primary storage in earlier computers. So, they were given a special preference while assigning the drive letters.

IBM’s VM family member CP/CMS took the help of drive letters to identify minidisks attached to a user session. The file reference (pathname) comprised of the drive letter, file name, and file letter. For example, A:MYFILE.TXT. The drive letter system was later visible in other operating systems including Microsoft’s MS-DOS and later in Windows.

Earlier, computers had two floppy drives for running programs and storing data. The hardware had support for two floppies. Thus, the preference for them was built into the OS itself. The hard drives came at a later stage and were assigned the letter C. Initially, the physical drives were assigned letters. As they got bigger in size, the logical volumes came up which are now assigned the drive letter. Starting from C, it makes room for floppy drives to be added at a later stage.

This thing doesn’t have a practical application anymore. But if you connect a floppy drive, it’ll be assigned the letter A and B for the next one. If you don’t have a floppy drive connected to your machine, you use the reserved letters A and B.

If you have something to add, tell us in the comments below.

Good News For Ubuntu Linux Lovers | Ubuntu 17.04 | Release Date & New Features

Short Bytes: Ubuntu 17.04 is scheduled to release next year in April 13. It’ll be a short-term release that’ll be supported for 9 months. At the moment, we don’t know much about the detailed features coming with Ubuntu 17.04. However, it’s expected to showcase more capabilities of Unity 8 and push Snap packages even more.

Following the release of Ubuntu 16.10, Canonical is gearing up for the release of the next iteration of the world’s most popular open-source operating system, i.e., Ubuntu 17.04. This release is codenamed Zesty Zapus after a jumping mouse found in the North American region. While Zapus stands for the genus name of a mouse, Zesty is an adjective for ‘great enthusiasm and energy.’

As the name suggests, this next short-term release will arrive in the month of April. If you’re an avid Ubuntu user, you must be knowing the significance of .04 in 17.04.

Ubuntu 17.04 Release Date

Ubuntu 17.04 final release will be generally available on April 13, 2017. Make sure to save the date. While Ubuntu project usually sticks to its dates, these dates can fluctuate as they depend on multiple factors like mirror syncing, printing of release notes, server configuration, etc.

Here’s the complete release schedule of Ubuntu 17.04:

• Alpha 1 – 29 December (for flavors)
• Alpha 2 – 26 January (for flavors)
• Feature Freeze — 16 February
• Beta 1 – 23 February (for flavors)
• UI Freeze — 9 March
• Final Beta – 23 March
• Kernel Freeze — 30 March
• Release Candidate — 9 April
• Stable Release – 13 April

Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus will be the fourth concurrently supported release when it’ll arrive in April. The other supported versions will be Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS and 16.10. This short term release will be supported for 9 months, i.e., until January 2018.

New features in Ubuntu 17.04

Ubuntu 17.04 will be released with the latest Linux kernel series 4.8. The same Linux kernel also ships with Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak.

The previous release arrived with Unity 8 Preview. Canonical has been working on Unity 8 for many years, and Ubuntu 17.04 will showcase its greater capabilities. At a Q&A session at Ubuntu Online Summit held earlier this year, Richard Collins, Product Manger at Canonical, said that Canonical is heavily focused on sharing a more evolved Unity 8 experience with Ubuntu 17.04. In the past, Canonical has also hinted that it’s going to get “a usable all-snaps based Unity 8 image by 17.04.” Also, in Ubuntu 17.04, Canonical’s Snaps will surely be more noticeable.

At the time of writing this article, Canonical is yet to release any new Ubuntu 17.04 features. As Canonical starts releasing more feature-rich builds, I’ll be updating this article to include more updates.

Ubuntu 17.04 download

Canonical has started releasing the Ubuntu 17.04 Daily Builds. While it’s not recommended that you install these builds on your primary machine, you can use it on a test system or virtual machine. You can find the download links on the  release notes page.

How to upgrade from Ubuntu 16.10 to 17.04?

For upgrading to Ubuntu 17.04 on a desktop system, you simply need to open the “Software & Updates” Setting in System Settings and select the “Updates” tab. Now “Notify me of a new Ubuntu version” menu to “For any new version”. Now press Alt+F2 and type this in command box: update-manager -d

It should open the Update Manager and tell you that development builds of 17.04 are available. Now click on “Upgrade” and follow the on-screen instructions.

Do you wish to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus once it’s release? What are the new features that you’re expecting? Share your views in the comments.

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